‘Just how broken a bureaucracy is,’ someone told me once, ‘can be gauged from how quickly can they take a trivial problem and turn it into an intractable one.’ Walk up to an agency with a cure for cancer and they will throw every obstacle in your path because they don’t have enough bureaucrats trained to regulate the new technology. So when the Australian Labor government was criticized for letting in too many undesirable migrants from the Middle East the predictable result was the denial of asylum to two Egyptians seeking to avoid a fatwa for converting to Christianity. It all makes sense in a twisted kind of way.

With elections scheduled for August 21, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard has been locked in war of words with conservative opposition leader Tony Abbot over asylum policy. “Asylum seeking” is Australia’s equivalent of the Arizona border problem. It’s the Third Rail of Australian politics. Sixty four percent of Australians want asylum seekers arriving by boat to be returned and made to apply through normal channels. Even ethnic leaders want the maritime human trafficking problem stopped.

a Somali scholar told the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] that some extremists from Somalia and other countries are trying to enter Australia by infiltrating the immigration system. The warning came from Islamic scholar Dr Herse Hilole, who is a leader in the Somali community in Australia. He said that rather than going back to countries like Somalia to train with militant groups, extremists were trying to enter Australia via boats from Malaysia and Indonesia.

An article in the Sydney Morning Herald highlighted one reasons why voters are angry: crime. Gangs now rampage through King’s Cross. The SMH writes: “they call themselves MBM – the Muslim Brotherhood Movement – a gang of 600 men who boast they are the toughest and best young street fighters of Middle Eastern descent in Sydney.”

Even hardened private security guards have expressed concern to police about the indiscriminate “punch and run” tactics of MBM members who, in the past two weeks, have arrived in large numbers at city nightclub venues and who walk the streets in intimidating mobs. But the objectives of MBM – its emblem features two crossed pistols and a hand grenade – and its leadership remain unclear to officers of both the Organized Crime and Gang Squad and Middle Eastern Organized Crime Squad.

But if the police are baffled, the nature of the game is obvious to their rivals: the BFL and the Asesinoz. It is to create a street empire compounded of crimes, drugs, prostitutes and radical ideology. And that’s worth fighting for. “Police say BFL – with a logo featuring crossed machine-guns – is not dissimilar to MBM in its extremist views.” And then there’s Asesinoz. Shake them all together and you’ve got a group that fills a valuable niche in the economy, ‘willing to do crimes that Australians won’t do’. Police describe Asesinoz, comprising teenagers of Middle Eastern decent, as “tough kids” who use the video-sharing website YouTube to promote Islamic extremism and anti-Australian actions such as flag burning.

It’s no wonder that the voting on August 21st will hinge in part on which party is perceived to be tougher about who to let into the country. The solution to this problem is obvious and straightforward to any bureaucrat. Just deny asylum to two Egyptians who are running for their lives from a fatwa in Egypt. Mr. El-Gohary and his 15 year old daughter made two mistakes. The first was converting to Christianity. The LA Times blog describes his efforts to get the Egyptian government to recognize his Baptismal ceritificate, which unfortunately did not have a crossed machine-gun logo on it. It reads like Monty Python sketch except that it ends with a fatwa.

In the eyes of Egypt, Maher El Gohary is not a Christian. An administrative court has ruled that the convert cannot be issued identity papers as a Christian … El Gohary, who converted to Christianity in 1973, has been living with Muslim identity papers. But he claims that persecution over the years prompted him to demand the right to officially change his religion. …

In his mission to obtain such a right, El Gohary provided the court with documents stating that he was baptized by the Orthodox Church in Cyprus in 2005, as well as by the Shebin Al Qanater archbishop in Qalyoub, a governorate in Egypt.

The administrative court ruled that both documents were ‘legally invalid’ because the Cypriot certificates were written in Greek and did not include any “clear evidence” that El Gohary was actually baptized.

The problem as you might have guessed, is that the Egyptian bureaucracies have got an ID system which they want to protect. The BBC explains why IDs are again causing a such a ruckus, for a reason outwardly different from Arizona, but really the same. The IDs are about politics and in this case they are a way of maintaining the Muslim majority dominance in Egypt and thus may on no account be undermined.

At the Arabic Human Rights Information Network, I met Gamal Eid, a lawyer fighting a similar case on behalf of another religious convert.

He believes that if Mr Gohary’s case is successful, it could have far-reaching consequences.

“Many people in their ID are Muslim, or Christian, or Jewish – but they believe different things,” he says.

“Many of them are afraid to convert officially. If that door opens – huge numbers of people will try to convert from Muslim to Christian. The law gives them this right.”

Peter Day, writing in the Spectator (only the cached copy is available) describes what happened next. The El-Goharys tried to migrate legally to Australia. That was the second mistake. Egyptians living in Sydney applied for refugee visa on El Gohary’s behalf. But according to Peter Day on July 21, Ian J. Simpson, the Principal Migration Officer at the Australian in Cairo replied that he was “not satisfied that there are compelling reasons for giving special consideration to granting you a visa, having regard to particular factors in the criteria … not met by you … the degree of persecution to which the applicant is subject in the applicant’s home country.” Denied. Not persecuted enough.

The immigration agent who lodged the Sydney application on Mr El-Gohary’s behalf is stunned. The agent points out that Egyptians who arrive by boat or plane in Australia claiming to be persecuted members of the Muslim Brotherhood (a powerful but technically illegal organisation in Egypt) are usually granted protection visas quickly, even in the absence of documentary … evidence supporting their claims.

The agent — who has represented members of the Muslim Brotherhood seeking refugee status in Australia — says ‘Mr El-Gohary is not a boat arrival, nor is he a person who comfortably arrived in Australia by plane and then applied for a protection visa. Mr El-Gohary is a person who trusted the Australian immigration system to forward his genuine and serious claims.’

Why was El-Gohary denied when the Muslim Brotherhood can waltz in the door? The answer: politics. What El-Gohary’s supporters fail to understand is that the game is played not by the stated rules but by the real ones. The real criterion is who can deliver the votes. Niall Ferguson during his trip through Australia said “dramatic changes are occurring in Australia’s population. Not talking about Muslim migration is damaging.” But not as damaging as losing the votes. And they’ve got the votes. A big wave of Islamic immigration into Australia has meant that that the Muslim Brotherhood crowd and not the El-Goharys are the force to reckon with at the ballot box. And therefore politicians have got to tread a fine line between the outraged Aussie Anglo voter and the crowd with the hand grenades and machine guns on their logos. Caught between Scylla and Charybdis, the man with the Greek baptismal certificate hasn’t got a chance.

Victor Davis Hanson described the same paradox in America. The political elite was pandering to a militant illegal immigration lobby yet desperately trying to mollify 70% of the population who wanted to control the borders. They were trying to square the circle and the result, as Hanson wrote, was that “Americans are increasingly confused by the tone of the debate, in which self-appointed spokesmen for illegal aliens and indeed, on occasion, illegal aliens themselves seem so critical of policies embraced by 70% of the American populace of all classes and races that they so eagerly wish to join.” He might as well have been talking about Australia where the numbers are strikingly similar. The politicians have to persuade the base they are not selling out to attract the marginal voters, which of course they are, and they are often caught playing both ends against the middle.

And then there’s jobs. The bureaucratic kind. The political elites in both countries need a steady supply of hyphenated populations to provide sinecures for an army of activists, special pleaders and assorted faddists. What would they do with normal people? Messy multiculturalism a vast outdoor system of relief for the country classes. Hanson writes:

Take away a half-million person influx of illegal aliens of the Hispanic underclass, or take away a permanent group of largely Spanish-speaking, largely poor, and largely undereducated Mexican nationals, and within 30 years the vast majority of Mexican-Americans will assimilate in the pattern of other contemporary minority groups — and, in terms of education and compensation, achieve rough parity. Unfortunately, that would also mean that the argument for a Chicano-Latino Studies program (rather than, say, an Irish Studies program), for the self-identified Chicano journalist, or for any activist who sees his Hispanic heritage as essential rather than as incidental to his persona simply disappears. (We do not have a National Council of Das Volk; nor a self-identified “wise Greek” on the Supreme Court.)

In short, without the arrival of the illegal alien in massive numbers without education, capital, legality and English, the Hispanic activists and cultural elite have no reason to be, since soon there would be no disparity that can be blamed on oppression or racism — and thus no need for self-appointed collective representation. La Raza would have no raza when a Hilda Lopez marries Larry Smith and their daughter Linda Lopez Smith marries Billy Otomo and so on.

The double affliction under which Maher El-Gohary labors is he can’t be admitted because the voters are angry at the people who fatwa’d him — and he’s too ordinary. He doesn’t need special multicultural agencies to pander to him, a special Islamic council to speak for him; a police task force to monitor him or ethnic politicians to run in his name. A hard working, law abiding immigrant is bad news all around. Except at tax time. There are lots of hardworking immigrants; and there are many law abiding, decent Muslim immigrants from the Middle East. But for some reason they never drive the agenda. It is puzzling until you realize that “bureaucracies are different from you and me. They possess everything and want more, and it does something to them; it makes them see everything through the prism of an almost metastatic desire to expand. Where ordinary people see a solution, they see a problem. Where we cynical they are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born into the agency, it is very difficult to understand.” I wish I had written that. Scott Fitzgerald almost did.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.– “The Rich Boy” (1926)

130 Comments, 130 Threads

I’ve made a hobby out the study of bureaucracy over the years and I’d like to post a few articles I’ve saved. These are no particular order:

1) Study: Regulation costs California economy almost $500 billionhttp://www.sba.ca.gov/Cost%20of%20Re…0-%20Final.pdf(That’s a staggering amount of money for one state. I’d love to see a legitimate study to show where the tipping point is in the size of a given government’s size vs efficiency)

Exclusive: Jobs ‘Saved or Created’ in Congressional Districts That Don’t Exist
Human Error Blamed for Crediting New Stimulus Jobs to Nonexistent Placeshttp://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jobs-…ory?id=9097853(The larger a government gets, the more wasteful and inefficient it becomes)

Having government operate this way is good for nobody. When you’re taking a number and your 15 page form, filled out in triplicate, goes through several agencies and sub-agencies before getting lost, those who mismanage it don’t care whether you’re a liberal or conservative.

It also provides more power for congresscritters to break the logjam for deserving constituents (those with cash, votes or good publicity), Get a bad death panel ruling? Go see your congresscritter to get the treatment you deserve. Stuck in a beaurocratic maze – call constituent service – that is, if you can muster what the Russians call “BLAT” or influence.

Which brings up another possibility that the elites have not considered – Americans and probably Australians are not good little serfs and have a distressing tendency to go postal on unresponsive (or perceived as unjust) arbiters of destiny. Could be our ambitious rulers will need to invest in body guards over the long hall./

Wretchard: It is puzzling until you realize that “bureaucracies are different from you and me. They possess everything and want more, and it does something to them; it makes them see everything through the prism of an almost metastatic desire to expand. Where ordinary people see a solution, they see a problem.

Rem acu tetigisti.

Now take what you have written in this article and combine it with what Angelo Codevilla has pointed out already. It will merge and give you a pretty good picture of how the oligarchs who run the show really operate. Truely, they don’t give a rat’s tender patoot about what you or I think, nor what the majority of people want, nor about what the Constitution say, nor even about “the rule of law”. It’s all about their hanging on to power.

“Which brings up another possibility that the elites have not considered – Americans and probably Australians are not good little serfs and have a distressing tendency to go postal on unresponsive (or perceived as unjust) arbiters of destiny. Could be our ambitious rulers will need to invest in body guards over the long hall.“

They have developed other ways. It used to be that if you protested your property valuation (for tax purposes), you sat down and pleaded your case and a decision was made then and there.

Now you meet with a junior clerk who takes basic information, then you are called to see a more senior clerk (in a a secured area) who takes more input, then it is all sent off to the state capitol where some panel decides your fate. You are eventually sent a letter with their decision.

W: another in a very long unbroken chain of excellent essays. Thanks. I spent a little time in Oz last year so I can almost visualize the street scene you sketch, populated by these young gentlemen giving new energy to society and the cultural matrix.

I think bureaucracy is best understood as an multicellular organism. It has no central nervous system, no directing will. Oh, of course, the senior appointees think they are issuing rules and guidelines; but in fact the organism has adapted to display surface behaviors suggesting compliance, ephemeral activity that satisfies the “new orders,” and meanwhile it continues to abide by its primary directive: protect your budget and your headcount.

This has nothing to do with politics. It has everything to do with the “invisible hand” which operates within bureaucracies as well as in the classic open market. The invisible hand is powered by the oldest forces of all: personal greed, fear and pride.

There is no escaping these forces. The problem with the bureaucracies is that they shield their processes from real accountability. Like bacteria which erect a barrier of slime under which they can prosper unnoticed.

No easy way to fix this, except massive and relentless cutting of budgets. Tell the government that it is on a 10-year plan to reach 50% size, and it’s up to them to figure out what to cut. The constraint is merely that next year they will have only 90% of the money, and the year after that 90% of that, etc. (Personally I’d start with a 20% haircut just to shock them into the right frame of mind…).

It’s a mistake to think that this is driven by politics. The politics are just the play of light on the creature’s skin.

Alas, in the clouded eyes of the ruling class it is far worse to have a cross on your shield or next to your name than a pair of AKs, pistols,crescent or such.
Leo used the word “accountability” again yesterday. We will soon learn what that word means to “drain the swamp” Pelosi and her crew when they bring the hammer down on comrade Rangel….

Be it America, Australia, Austria or Pogo Pogo the problem with immigration is that it is controlled by politicians and their sycophants, bureaucrats. Of course those politicians attempt to use immigration to their advantage. That is what politicians do.
The Mencken solution is to take the politicians out of the loop and let private enterprise control who immigrates and who doesn’t. Let personal placement agencies open branches in countries that allow it and find immigrants to fill jobs. First make sure there are no natives to fill those jobs. That way the immigrant has a job waiting and has been vetted more thoroughly then the State Department can do it.
Once in country, that immigrant will be a worker, which would allow their co-workers to check them out to see if they have terrorist urges. This approach would make immigrants an asset, not a liability.
It will never happen, of course. It would solve the problem once and for all.
Neither party has politicians willing to give up the potential prize of all those votes. I believe the technical term is ‘pandering’.

Coordination is not necessary. Elites will not stand up to their society’s mortal enemies when the elites themselves despise their own heritage, culture, history, institutions, and religion. Then it becomes all about power and what good is power if power doesn’t allow you to inflict pain upon someone else (especially if you get to play God and put another person in death’s path).

The first English-heritage Australians were selected for their sheep-stealing tendencies and other signs of strongly anti-social behavior. Many generations later, their descendants don’t seem like such a bad lot.

The issue is not immigration. It is the combination of immigration with handouts & special dispensations in the new land. When unsuccessful immigrants faced starvation, it concentrated the mind wonderfully and brought out the best in people. When unsuccessful native-born people faced the same challenge, it kept them on their toes too.

Are the problems with immigration really a reflection of the idiocies and perverse incentives of the welfare state — run by those same bureaucrats Wretchard describes?

#8 Skip_this_post- it’s not the bureaucrats that are sycophants of the politicians, but politicians that are sycophants of the bureaucrats.

In some story from the 50′s or 60′s- I think it was by Kurt Vonnegut but it may have been by someone else- a man is awaiting execution, tied to a 20 foot tall pillar. He is described as craning his neck to look at the top, apparently with some idea that he can maneuver himself over it and free himself.

A man about to die can be expected to grasp at such delusions. Most people opposed to the regime unfortunately are just like this man. If only we can somehow organize ourselves, motivate the elctorate, and take power! All will be well! But there is no way the system can be changed by conventional means. Elections and referenda mean nothing. Proposition 187 was the clear will of the California elctorate, but one judge said no, and that was it. SB1070 is the clear will of the Arizona electorate, but one judge said no, and that looks to be the end of it. Governor Brewer seems prepared for a “compromise” which will totally disarm it. And if the state appeals, why would another judge overrule Bolton?

We live in an authoritarian oligarchy, not a constitutional republic. Coming to terms with that reality is the first step.

#11 Thrasymachus – But there is no way the system can be changed by conventional means. Elections and referenda mean nothing….We live in an authoritarian oligarchy, not a constitutional republic. Coming to terms with that reality is the first step.

I have not posted for the last several days because I have been “out of my bubble” in the real world.

Doing what? Going door to door trying to talk to people about the mess we are in and what they can do and why.

I have spent money I don’t have on paper and ink cartridges so that I have hand outs to give people. Even those that won’t talk, I slid it under the door or leave in their mailbox.

I have spent many hours and have many, many more to do in the less than one hundred days to election. I have taken this time away from the two most valued people in my life. My two grand daughters. But actually I’m doing all of this for them, but they are too young to care or understand. All they know is that “Papa is working”.

Yes I am working. I’m working now so that I won’t have to be fighting in the future. That is if I live that long and things go terribly wrong.

But in actuality, I hope that things go wrong while I’m alive – if they must go wrong – because I have already seen the elephant and I know how to fight even if it is the last thing I want.

I am not going to let my grand children have to do and see the things I have seen.

Well, that is not entirely true. I have two grandsons in the fight now. So far they have been lucky and by the grace of God and their training they still fight on.

I’m not sure how much I will ever post here again. I’m getting the feeling that this place is nothing more than an echo chamber and that some that post are not willing to work, fight or die for their high fa-luting words and ideals.

ONE more time. Get out from behind your keyboards and get out among the general public and plan, work and do everything you can before this coming election and after, no matter what the outcome.

I am very pessimistic about the outcome of any elections. The democrats and their backers have shown that they have no problem, in fact would rather lie, cheat and steal elections. Or buy them.

Anyway, just dropped in to give my two cents. But I might say. Disregard what I have said in the past and in this comment at your families and your peril.

WE have real enemies working for the downfall of our Republic. It is past time for passive talking or typing, its time for action on every American’s part that wants to protect and preserve our Republic.

I have a cousin who is retarded and has an associated medical condition that leads to extreme obesity if not controlled by intervention. My uncle, his father, worked tirelessly to set up a home where people with his son’s kind of affliction could live and receive the care of professionals.

He got the home set up and operating – and then the bureaucrats stepped in. That was thought to be good, since the state government would assume the responsibility of funding the home. But in fact it proved to be disastrous. A state bureaucrat decided that my cousin was not being helped sufficiently by living at the home and so would have to leave. Now check out that logic: the people who need it most don’t get it.

Government bureaucracies have a strange kind of internal logic. Programs that are spending their money both well and promptly have their funding cut to prop up those that are screwing up by not spending it fast enough. Military bases that have the best looking lawns and buildings are rewarded by “winning” more money for base beautification. Leaders who save money by careful management are penalized for creating “slush funds” with the savings. At one base I served at an organization that had two massive failures in a row received 80 medals for their superb work at recovering, while our outfit, which had a 5 year string of unbroken successes, was told we did not deserve any because “we were just doing our jobs the way they were supposed to be done anyway.”

A committee is the only animal with multiple arms and legs and no brain. A government bureaucracy is such a creature that cannot be killed.

#12, the exercise of our 2nd amendment rights. As frequently and as accurately as possible. The problem with that, like all political events, is the timing.
A successful revolution will require overwhelming support from the citizens. That is the only way to keep the Military on the sidelines.
We (conservatives) need two conditions.
First 3/4 of the citizens have to realize that the system is so corrupt that it’s self correcting features no longer work.
Second, there has to be an event that galvanizes the population to the point where they are ready for action. A Ft. Sumter, if you will.
American history shows many examples of the military being used to put down insurrections. IIRC, the most recent was the bonus army in the 30′s. Kent State could have been such an event only the military backed down. Johnson was a bully and a coward. Plus the command structure of the National Guard has a politician in between the actual military commander and the troops. That gives the National Guard a legal out with orders they don’t like.
It is illegal to use regular troops against Citizens. EVERY officer in the US Military knows that. They all understand that orders to fire on Americans are illegal orders and obeying is optional. Which means they are not really orders in a military sense.
Keep the military on the sidelines and let the fighting be between Liberals and Conservatives and we will win. Then the issue becomes restoring some sort of consensual government.
That is why I see the best way forward is a Constitutional Convention ( AKA 5th Amendment, Article V Convention). This is a last ditch effort to avoid a civil war. Civil Wars are the worst sort of war.

Going the extra mile is worth the wait.
Forget those cries that America will soon be destroyed. When the first Europeans came to this land, they were much worse off then we are today. Look what was built. Even if we have to start from scratch, we can rebuild America. So it’s better to wait and get the timing right then to act in haste and repent in leisure.

Having looked at the Article V issue in some depth, I agree that it is option. It is, in fact, the nuclear option, one that puts everything on the table.

But that is why I believe it will never happen. It’s kinda like Mutually Assured Destruction – the possession of a credible, survivable nuclear capability lowers the likelihood of its use (a simple strategic insight that was beyond the grasp of the “No Nukes” movement).

The key to such a capability, however, is credibility. And that is why I’ve come to the view that it will never be necessary to call an Article V convention.

To call a conventions, 2/3rds of the state legislatures must pass a resolution. This is the key capability.

But if it is that credible, if the people can, in fact, get 34 state legislatures to pass a law with such far reaching impact, then the state legislatures, working together, can get the Federal Government to do anything they want. Washington will do anything to avoid the “nuclear option” of Article V.

(Remember: last time a constitutional convention was called, it was to revise the Articles of Confederation. They ended up throwing the whole thing out. Washington politicians will not take that risk.)

So the key is for the people to retake control of their state legislatures, developing sufficient influence so as to compel those legislatures to force the Federal Government to return to its historic, Constitutionally-proscribed role.

Sufficient influence will only come from the hard work of defeating incumbents. When an incumbent politician believes that you can defeat him at the polls, he will do whatever you want. Their instinct for self-preservation overrides all other considerations.

1. Teach the people to drop “vote bombs” in primary elections.
2. Defeat incumbents in state legislature primary elections, replacing them with candidates committed to reclaiming their state’s rightful authority.
3. Compel the state legislatures to force a devolution of the authority usurped by the Federal Government, using Article V if necessary (although it shouldn’t be necessary). If state officials do not follow through, repeat 1 and 2.
4. Once the states retake the authority, repeat 1-3 for the state-local nexus.
5. Continue for as long as the people want self-governance.

Five difficult steps to restoring breaking the Ruling Class and self-governance.

“On July 20, 22 young illegal immigrants in caps and gowns entered the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., and began sit-ins in the offices of several senators. Twelve soon returned to the atrium, where they formed a circle around a banner reading “Undocumented and Unafraid.” Refusing to be moved, the students were arrested by Capitol Police, as were nine others who had stayed put in the offices of Sen. John McCain and Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Less than two miles away, a similar protest by a separate but allied group was taking place at Lafayette Square in front of the White House. These students went a step further. Openly announcing their immigration status and giving their full names just across the Mall from Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters, they forced a difficult choice upon ICE officials.

Take no action, and ICE would undermine the law. But come down hard by deporting the students, many of them still teenagers, and it would risk drawing overwhelming public outcry. . . .

The protests this month are most significant not because of any direct influence they may have on lawmakers, but because they are drawing other young people with illegal status out into the open, undoing the chilling effect that legal vulnerability has long had on illegal immigrants’ political activism. As the fall elections near, such activism will likely serve as another flash point for an already volatile issue.”

A big challenge the people face is how to pick leaders to speak for them, and means of holding them accountable.

This is a weakness of the Tea Party movement (or any self-organized, bottom-up movement). How should a Tea Party pick its leaders? Is it just because some schlub says he’s a leader? Does leadership go to the guy who is the most aggressive and self-promoting? How is that different than Congress, and why would the results be different over the long run? And if there a lousy Tea Party leader, what is the process for removing them?

Right now, people vote with their feet. But that is really inefficient. If you have a Tea Party that has 1,000 members, and the only way for people to express discontent is to leave, how does the movement correct the inevitable mistakes without starting over? And as the Tea Party movement grows, and its power with it, how do you keep the power-grabbers away from the leadership posts?

This is exactly the problem faced by early American settlers, and they evolved a system that was built around a set of self-governance processes like Town Halls, caucuses, and elections, which led to the development of political parties. When a leader wasn’t performing, they replaced them. In short, the people developed mediating institutions. And the mediating institutions provided an efficient way to select leaders, and hold them accountable.

For our movement to reform the Federal Government to have sustainable momentum, it must have a source of formal authority, a way for representatives to say, legitimately, “The People Sent Me.” It needs a mediating institution with formal authority.

As an aside, I recently got a proposal asking for signatures to a sort of “Contract for America” listing the things conservatives want Congress to change in the next session. It began with the statement, “We the people of the United States of America…”

But it struck me: who the hell are these guys to deign to speak on behalf of the people of the USA? Who died and made them king? (I didn’t sign the document.)

The Declaration and Constitution were negotiated by representatives selected by the people through a formal process. That gave the delegates formal authority to speak on behalf of the people they represented.

We need formal authority for a task as large as taming the Federal Leviathan.

State legislatures possess such formal authority. The only trick will be to get them to respond to the people. That will come by making it clear that incumbents can be beaten at will, no matter how powerful they appear. Accountability enforced at the ballot box.

Once the people take back their states, they can take back their country.

Being part of a bureaucracy, I am familiar with the game the Aussie immigration people are playing. It’s simple- they are mad at being told by the populace that they shouldn’t let in a bunch of creeps and criminals (though, of course I am sure they would phrase it in a different way than I do). As a result, they then play hardball on a case like El-Gohary’s, and use the argument “Well, you did want us to get tough!”. The idea is to try to make everyone who opposed their immigration policies feel bad, and demand changes- changes that coincidentally will take immigration back to where it was before, and where the bureaucrats (being left-wing) want it to be.

The Australian government is a racist hate based organization who is in the process of genocide against the Australian people. They are aiding and abetting terrorists for the single purpose of fulfilling those aims. The government will be able to extort any amount of money they want without a complaint from the taxpayer who is after all their slaves. They will also be able to murder any citizen they deem necessary while laundering in human suffering. It is the foreign dynamic that allow these acts. The Australian government tolerates Somali extremists because they hate human beings and will side with those who are most likely to kill you. Your government hates you and wants you to die. See what they do about it and you will see.

An Article V Convention may indeed be the “nuclear option” as seen from the viewpoint of the Feds, but its kind of like a gun–if your attacker knows that you will not use it it gets you nothing.

Some states need to pass resolutions calling for such a convention asking that Amendments need to be proposed in regards to very specific issues.

And let us not forget that the dynamic is very different from that which normally flows in our federal system. Population means nothing. Each state is equal to any other here, and the number of States would be the deciding factor, not their respective populations. The great political divide in the US is essentially that of the urban areas versus the rural and suburban regions. In terms of a Constitutional convention the urban areas would be at a disadvantage.

But yes, we do need to start calling for one. Hopefully the Feds would wake up and we wouldn’t need to actually have it. I’m beginning to suspect that that’s about the only thing now that will make them wake up.

What you’re referring to is a primary strategy for any bureaucracy under threat. I call it “maximizing public discomfort.” Whenever there are honest attempts to rain in spending, the bureaucracy “complies” by cutting people and/or programs that will have the most visible negative impact on the public. For example, when a tax increase is voted down at a local level, the local ruling class will immediately close beaches and parks, even though they could achieve the same savings by eliminated mid-level bureaucrats who perform no useful service and that no one would miss. The public responds predictably, and the bureaucrats shrug their shoulders and say, “we told you we needed the money.”

To remedy this, spending cuts (or any other attempt to reduce the size and/or power of government) must be accompanied by specific prescribed actions that force the bureaucracy to do the right thing. In the example you note, it’s perfectly acceptable to limit Muslim immigration, but an unpaid citizens’ panel (much like a jury) could be impaneled monthly (with different people each month) to review and rule on “special cases” that might warrant exception to the no immigration rule. The bureaucracy is neutered (at least to some extent) and the will of the people is achieved.

Without revealing too much, I’m very very familiar with Australia and Australians. They are in many ways like Americans (whether they want to admit it or not) and are sharing many of the same issues Americans are facing currently.
And like Americans, they are a people who want to ‘do the right thing’ and who will go quite a long ways toward avoiding violence as a means to settle the social/political issues we all face/have faced as nations. (But bar fights? Hey, that’s another story…)
However, like Americans, they can only be pushed so far.
And in both countries, patience is starting to wear thin, although I think it’s moving closer to a boiling point here than there.

L3:Sufficient influence will only come from the hard work of defeating incumbents. When an incumbent politician believes that you can defeat him at the polls, he will do whatever you want. Their instinct for self-preservation overrides all other considerations.

Good points all, L3, but it is not working for those folks in Arizona as the shape-shifter McCain is today sounding like most of us wished he would have campaigned against Obama.

And he is going to kill J. D. Hayworth in the primary. In short, he is the quintessential politician and the voters in Arizona are not smart enough to know that he is a Dem in Rino clothing.

The Arizona Republicans have to be brain-damaged to return this fossil to the SSenate. And I say this as an old Navy guy.

The myopia of some of these politicians as to where they are driving this country is nothing short of staggering.

It shows that they really very much like themselves way more than they do their country – and for McCain to act the way he does after spending years in the Hanoi Hilton by itself shows how corrucping is the miasma of Washington DC.

4. TalnikThere seems to be a coordinated effort by all Western governments to destroy their own countries. Maybe there is something to this Bilderberg conspiracy thing.

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

With the fall of the USSR I had an epiphany: the people who were right about the Soviets and communism early on, and who also predicted the eventual fate of the USSR and its minions, were often odious crackpots, or were reasonable people perceived as such. Joe McCarthy was largely, though not entirely, vindicated as to the substance of his charges by the Venona Files. Odd and off-putting people like the John Birch Society and various reactionary immigrant groups from Eastern Europe were correct in their opinions of the Eastern Bloc, the UN, and various international organizations. I came to realize that there was something very wrong with a world where the apparently crazier and more “offensive” among us were so much closer to the truth about our avowed enemies than those of us whoe were “reasonable.”

I don’t think the western world’s elites efforts are so much ‘coordinated’ as they are the result of a shared mindset that leads them to do parallel things in seeming concert. So many of them go to the same kinds of schools, hold very similar worldviews, and are first at the trough in the globalized political correctness that infects our governments and institutions.

Without revealing too much, I’m very very familiar with Australia and Australians. They are in many ways like Americans (whether they want to admit it or not) and are sharing many of the same issues Americans are facing currently.

One unfortunate difference is that they have been largely disarmed after a wave of hysteria following an awful incident in Tasmania some years ago.

#13 — Papa Ray — Thanks for the work you are doing. FWIW, I’m misbehaving in similar ways, and it’s clear several other people here are, too. It’s going to make a difference. Something got out of the bottle around 1776 and they’ll never get it back in.

Papa Ray @ 19 – Don’t leave us, PR. You are an inspiration, even if no-one tells you about it. For myself, I think what you are doing is not just admirable; I believe it is also effective. I may not be able to go about it the same way, but it is at least partly your influence that has convinced me of the need to donate everything I can, and show up at the right places when I can. My natural tendency has been to eschew political action other than voting and arguing with friends and reading history, but the time for that was never right – or so I have come to believe. More is required if we are to remain free. Perhaps much more than those of us who have been the beneficiaries of others’ efforts have had the courage to guess.

I’m not sure the timing is right, but the cool thing about all of this is that it is completely unpredictable. When the American people decide to act, it will be game over for the Ruling Class. Maybe an Article V convention initiative can be the spark; maybe it will be something else. We just need to keep working to add dry tinder to the pile. It will light when it is time to light, and not a second before.

W made essentially this point about Codevilla’s article. The reason it is having an impact is timing. The soufflé came out of the oven just in time for dessert. A little later, the diners would already have left for the smoking room; a little earlier, and it would be a fallen dish of goo. The skill in soufflé making is not so much in mixing of the ingredients (although that’s important) as in the sense of when to have it ready to serve.

Your point is exactly correct: there is no way to make an impact in Federal elections. The game is completely rigged, and challengers simply cannot win against an entrenched incumbent. It takes too much money and too much organization, and all of the corporate, union, academic, lobby, and media interests (aka the Ruling Class) and their political consultant Rasputins will keep incumbents safely ensconced upon their thrones.

The battle for control of Federal elections is over. The Ruling Class has won.

That is why the war must be fought at the state level. The Washingtonians think they’ve got the game fixed, and that is why they now have free license to spend money they don’t have. Accountability is gone.

But there is still hope at the state level. We can win in primary elections. I know. I’ve looked at the numbers. It will take lots of work – blockwalking like Papa Ray and Salt Lick, spreading the word like the BC commentariat, training new leaders like American Majority, etc – but it will succeed.

The beauty of the state approach is that the success of the Ruling Class in taking over DC has required them to pour all of their resources into the national arena. That has left the states available for the taking.

The next step will be for the states to coordinate their response to Federal intrusions. You’re already seeing a glimpse of that with the state AGs who are banding together to file suit against Obamacare. But that is small beer compared to the Octoberfest of resistance that states can mount once they start to coordinate.

Papa Ray, I’m doing what I can around here, too. Been a hard slog so far. I’m a very “blue” county in Virginia full of bureaucrats and govt contractors mainly. I go down south a bit, however, and the ground’s more fertile. Everybody not in NoVa can see what NoVa’s doing to the makeup of the state. The way Virginia breaks is increasingly dependent on the way NoVa breaks, as we’ve seen in the last few senatorial and presidential elections. NoVa’s the bluest of blue, everybody slavering over the money train that pulls through each year. The Old Dominion is purple now, quickly trending blue. It’s sickening. Carpetbagged once again! We’re becoming like New York State, where those in upstate are prisoners to NYC’s influence on Albany, or in California where the Bakersfield boys haven’t got a prayer in Sacramento up against the LA or Firsco forces.

What makes it a treble shame, is that L3 is right on when he observes that state and local pushback against the feds is the most effective option against them. It might be best to get inside their OODA loop and fight them at their own game. For instance, were I the governor of AZ, I’d fight the feds with their own ruling, and using their own tactics. The ruling is that the state law does not apply because it would be too onerous upon federal resources. Really? You wanna go there? You mean to tell me we can invalidate laws on account of undue burdens they might place on other government entities? Well, bless my soul, where do we begin, looking at the raft of unfunded federal requirements placed on the State of Arizona? Do they really want to see how many policies I don’t think I’ll enforce anymore, on account of the undue burden? And I’d regulate them to death. Seriously, no federal offical could step out the door in my state without carrying the proper identification, without the proper uniformed, yes uniformed, dress if he’s an IRS accountant. And by the way I might have to consider federal withholding to be an undue burden, and quit deducting it from all checks issued by the State of Arizona. They want their money, they can come and get it from the people themselves. This might be rich ground to create a regime of special fees and taxes to help offset the costs of these undue burdens placed upon our state, and also a regime of advisory boards, to help the feds have better and more fair access to Arizona people, of course.

States could fight back in a million ways, tie things up in court for years, cause the feds no end of headaches, should they choose to. Might be time to start.

All of the costs in #1 could be eliminated if the States tell the Federal Government that they will no longer comply or participate in any program or comply with any Federal law unless the Constitution has expressly given that power to the Federal Government.
1. Good by Health, Education and Welfare.
2. Good by Foreign Aid.
3. Good by all Federal Subsidies.
4. No federal tax on fuels that are produced and used within a State.
This list is just a start. I’m sure smarter people than I can add to it easily.
States to Feds—–Kiss off!

A jury of sorts is an excellent idea- and perhaps more straightforward to set up than the alternate proposal of just throwing those bureaucrats out (as that is a difficult path to walk). The downside is of course that the same bureaucrats would be in power and still trying to work their way around our new jury system.

Having done some thinking, I see how Leo Linbeck III’s proposal for a return to patronage would help, as without permanent employment, the bureaucrats would be forced to act more in accordance with at least the wishes of the currently elected party.

My only concern with patronage has to do with the stories my parents told me about their time in Quebec and Eastern Canada. You see, in Quebec, there would be one side of the street with a paved road, and the other unpaved- that’s because only one side voted for the guy in power. Further east, you’d have a small town where one guy drove the town bulldozer. After the election, he’d hand the keys over to the guy who supported the other party (if his party lost), then he’d go on unemployment insurance. How can we allow for the beneficial parts, while avoiding some of the really negative aspects of patronage?

27. Don Rodrigo

That’s something I’ve been noticing as well- and it’s disturbing in many ways. I’ll read an argument that I know is wrong (from seeing it not work), but it will have been spoken in a form that I find familiar, intelligent and reasonable. I’ll read a counter argument that is correct, but to my ears it will sound a lot like… well, maybe a lot like how King Theoden would sound when speaking to Saruman. Apparently Tolkien had a great depth of insight that he was sharing.

It is universally true that all oil refineries use the highest level of labor input during the start-up and shake-down phase. One by one the kinks are worked out. In very short order the troops run out of needful things to do — but are kept on staff. The plant’s output is rising ever still. (pun not intended) So the labor cost per unit output is still dropping.

Now, if the boyz can figure out additional complications and tweeks more fat paydays are to be had. Unfortunately after six months to a year even creative bridge players (rubber) run out of flow-though improvements.

Unfortunately, the company (being private) figures this out. (Constant re-orders of ‘bicycles’ is a ‘tell.’) Then some meanie from corporate shows up like Broadcast News and trims the card players. More years pass, and one by one the jobs dry up. SCADA is the death nell: you end up sitting on your tush trying to stay alert and motivated while the system runs on algorithmic auto-pilot.

————-

Now lay this template onto the government payroll class.

New legislation is passed. Manning is ramped up like flies to the carcass: it’s the stink of new funding and sessions with the Government Printing Office. An entirely new parasitic niche within the rent-seeking economy has its corner stones laid.

Four years later the players are back to rubber bridge: case law and amendments have taken hold of their collective impressionist baster-piece. ( True fathers unknown — informally known as ‘our thing.’) Attempts at further complication and privileged exception are not enough to keep the caste high enough up Maslow’s scale. Instead, all the Winstons focus on Safety.

But this is an anti-profit enterprise, particularly in its own accounts. The excess manning is NEVER trimmed by some meanie from downtown.

The only solution is more card tables and coffee pots.

If some slick player ever tries to climb their rules or mine their budgets the card room will clear the bench!

———-

The poltico-economic fact of start-ups is that maximum manning is only needed at the start — and that as time goes by feather-bedding must take-off exponentially. (It has to because the need is a declining exponential.)

For those curious: research the nominal manning rates over experience-time in all of the process industries.

It’s true, blert. In your example a refinery has a performance metric, namely how much petroleum product it can refine. A bureaucrat has only two metrics that count, one is how big his budget is and the other is how many people he controls. He is unconcerned with everything else. If he can grow his budget and swell his payroll he has a career path upward within the agency. Those are the only things that count, and everything that happens is leveraged toward that end. It matters not one whit what the justification for the agency’s existence is, they all work the same way. Targets aren’t being met? Easy. The bureaucrat needs more bodies, and more equipment, and more office space. Somebody gets hurt on the job? Easy. He needs more safety personnel, he needs a bigger budget for training. Everything that happens, even what would be serve as setbacks in every other realm, have one handy solution for a bureaucrat: more money, more people. Even things that don’t happen get counted. These guys want to come demo their vehicle based solution out front of the building? Hazardous waste might flow out from underneath it! (ie., a little oil might drip out onto the grass).The guys across the street had an environmental team out there with $2000.00 tarps underneath their vehicle, we need a team like that with resources like that too!

Every year around Washington when the fiscal year winds down if Americans had any idea of what is going on with their money all over town we would face riots in the street all over the land. All monies sitting unused in everybody’s budgets has to get spent or they lose it. It’s been getting harder to do, to spend it all, and more and more midnight oil is being burned each year as bureaucrats scramble to lock it all down. We’re talking billions and billions of dollars here if you add it up. Nobody knows the exact figure but it’s got to be staggering. One agency last year spent $400 million on handheld radios, replacing the ones they bought just the year before, entirely because they were running out of ideas on where to spend. It is an insatiable cancer.

L3 @ 17: the state legislatures, working together, can get the Federal Government to do anything they want.”

No doubt. The difficulty with the State-based approach is that it will necessarily be very slow; the Political Class will have lots of time to see it coming and react; and they have lots of levers to pull to divert that train onto a siding.

There are many Political-Class-In-Waiting Quislings in State governments and local politics, most of whom would jump at the chance to earn merit in Federal Political Class eyes by selling out their fellow State residents. Most State govts depend on handouts from the Feds, and could easily be manipulated by threats of withheld funds. The Political Class is only a heartbeat away from having outright ownership of the Supreme Court, which would certainly rule that an Article V Convention can constitutionally only be summoned on February 30th.

I like your idea about independents in gerrymandered districts registering with the ruling party and voting incumbents out in the Primaries. We definitely should do that. But it is a Pearl Harbor move — the first impact will be dramatic, and then the Leviathan will change the rules on Primary elections and entrench itself even more deeply.

Sorry for being a downer, but we need to be realistic. The Political Class will react strongly — and maybe even effectively — to any perceived challenge. But there are a few other options out there.

One would be to pull a Br’er Rabbit and get the Political Class to throw us into the briar patch. Maybe like the Sandinista Ruling Class were bluffed into calling elections in 1990 — which they lost. But devising a workable briar patch strategy needs a more creative brain than mine.

Another option would be frontal assault — a modified tax strike. This basically supports your plan to get power back to the States, but accelerates the time line.

Suppose lots of us started cutting our Federal tax payments to zero, or only to the percentage which goes to the military. And sent those avoided Federal taxes to our State Govts instead. Suddenly, California’s financial woes would be over, and the Federal Political Class would have lost the mother’s milk of politics.

If I implement a tax strike on my own, I go to jail and no-one ever hears about it. If even 1-10% of taxpayers do this — between one & ten million people — then the Federal Govt will be unable to resist. Look at how even wimpy English tax-payers defeated their Ruling Class’s Poll Tax in 1990 through widespread refusal to comply. State Govts can then step forward and reassert a more equitable balance. (If California just blows the extra tax revenue, as history suggests is likely, then voting with our feet can resume within this readjusted federal structure).

But the simplest option is simply to sit and wait. We are at Peak Government. The Political Class has run out of money. They can’t keep on borrowing much longer; tax rate increases will simply reduce revenues and increase the pool of restive unemployed; spending cuts will be political suicide. Maybe we should be focusing on post-collapse actions?

Most State govts depend on handouts from the Feds, and could easily be manipulated by threats of withheld funds.

According to a statistic I read late last year — I believe on Instapundit — an unfortunate milestone was reached recently by state governments and their budgets: States, as an aggregate, now receive a bare majority of their “state” funding from the feds; less than half the revenue they “need” to operate comes from in-state sources. The new “Civil War” will involve a funding blockade rather than the naval blockade of the previous one.

Papa Ray #13 I agree. Now, not being a real warm and fuzzy type, but anti social, reclusive and reserved, I need your help. You, Papa Ray. Here’s what I need:
1. An outline of your spiel when you knock on that door.
2. A copy of one of your flyers.
You can send it to me at tlrugit at gmail dot com. Or, it its online, where? It might be worth putting online, and I’ll be happy to create a little website to post it for you.
Please.
Promise I’ll use it.

The Jamboree’s surprise guest is Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs. I love the guy, especially after seeing his talk on the TED site. Frankly, having Mike instead of Obama is not only more inspiring, it also more of an honor than having Obama.

We have been advised repeatedly that as mere citizens we have NO legal basis for pursuing criminal charges against local, state, or federal officials for bad decisions, actions, or omissions they commit in performing (or failing to perform) their offices. They are immunized from legal action, and unless they actually commit a specifically defined criminal act, they are not subject to criminal prosecution merely for failing to fulfill the duties of their office.

In many well-known cases of elected and appointed officials, they have continued in office for decades despite flagrant continual abuse and malfeasance, although this has usually meant tacit approval from or active cooperation or collusion with other officials with authority or discretion to censure or even dismiss’em.

If this is true, then a state or local official responsible for, say, collecting, depositing, and reporting taxes withheld from citizens of a state, couldn’t be charged with a crime for failure to do those things, or for simply going fishing instead of writing checks to the U.S. Treasury payable from funds collected by the state or local government.

Seems to me that if the bags of Democrat pus in the Senate can just wink and grin and pretend to rap Mr. “I-forget-how-many-properties-I’m-not-paying-any-tax-on” Rangle (just like they’ve done with countless other Democrat felons) it might be possible to use a similar strategy.

The thing about swords, oddly-enough…

Probably it would take someone well-acquainted with state and federal laws to comment on how scenarios might play out. But in many cases – like the Scopes trial – someone has to be willing to leap into the breach.

Most State govts depend on handouts from the Feds, and could easily be manipulated by threats of withheld funds.

You’ve hit the nub of the challenge in front of us. The Federal Government currently uses a big chunk of its tax revenues and “returns it to the states” in the form of block grants. In this way, they bribe state officials to go along with their cockamamie schemes. Even my Governor, Rick Perry, after making a big, public stand on principle that he wouldn’t take stimulus money, when confronted with a huge budget shortfall, er, took stimulus money. Go figure.

There are many Political-Class-In-Waiting Quislings in State governments and local politics,

You’re correct as well that state legislatures are filled with folks who want to go to Washington. But that’s one beauty of our strategy; once we have the states on our side, if Congress doesn’t want to comply with the states’ demands, we have a ready group of people who will run against the intransigent incumbents.

But it is a Pearl Harbor move — the first impact will be dramatic, and then the Leviathan will change the rules on Primary elections and entrench itself even more deeply.

The FEC has no jurisdiction over state elections. None. In Texas, for instance, there is no dollar limit on campaign contributions to state races. So, the Feds can certainly try to do something about it, but that one is really out of their reach.

Maybe we should be focusing on post-collapse actions?

Another advantage of our strategy. If, in fact, we do go through a systemic collapse of government, mediating institutions (e.g. Tea Parties, 9/11 groups, small businesses, neighborhood associations, etc.) will be the only thing that separate us from chaos and a return to our natural Hobbesian existence. For example, if Tea Parties learn how to govern themselves on a sustained basis, they can form the basis of a local governance structure should there be a collapse. And if there isn’t a collapse, these mediating institutions are the means by which we will break By investing in the development of mediating institutions, we are investing in our future, regardless which way the world turns.

One more thing:

A couple of threads back, you suggested I use “Federalism” instead of “subsidiarity.” There are two reasons why I prefer subsidiarity:

1. Subsidiarity has been around a lot longer. It is a core principle of the Catholic Church’s governance structure, and is one of the reasons the Church has survived for two millennia. Folks may disagree with what the Church teaches, but you can’t argue with the fact that it has been one of the most durable and long-lived institutions in human history. Subsidiarity is one reason why.

2. Federalism really speaks to the balance of power between the Federal Government and State Governments. But I believe the reform has to go further than the Federal-State nexus. I believe that the States themselves need to push down responsibility and authority to local governments. Even cities are too top-down and bureaucratic. My fair city, Houston, has about the same population as the United States at the time of the American Revolution. We would be well served by pushing responsibility down to the neighborhood level. That question would not be covered in a discussion about Federalism, but it would be quite relevant to a discussion around subsidiarity.

Anyway, I hope it’s clear that I have great affection for Federalism. But, at the end of the day, we need to push authority much further down than the states.

the suggestion in MadFiddlr’s #50 sounds like a plan that might be effective USING the current Dem’s SATURATION CARPET BOMBING strategy.

Y’know—their daily ration of 20 different effed-up actions EVERY SINGLE DAY for the last 19 months without letup:

On Monday, insult three or four allies, use the knee-pads to satisfy some Islamic HATE group (apologies for the redone-duncey), treble the tax rate for Viagara, Give a speech that insults Christians and Jews;

Tuesday, Give a speech that kisses up to Jihadists in Gaza, Lie like a sumbitch that no legislation cutting off veteran’s blood pressure medicine funding is being contemplated, send out 200 million $5.00 CDs to voters Denying that the one was ever videotaped kissing Palestinian Babies dressed as suicide Bombers while singing “The Internationale” in impeccable Arabic, Arrange for the bill for the CDs, labels, and Jewel cases to be sent to the RNC;

Wednesday, introduce new legislation banning the use of the word “Jew” in “Jewel cases” and providing funding for a commission to study possible new terminology to promote ways to promote Arab positive self-image in the language of CD-containers;

Thursday, give a speech complimenting the SEIU on their self-restraint for not particularly beating anyone up in the last 24 hours that we know of, and insulting mean-spirited racist Tea-Baggers, smile slyly while rubbing nose with the finger that everyone understands to be the standard flip-off, send family in Air Force One, Two, Seven, and Twelve to shop at Harrod’s in London in the morning, then to Paris in the evening, with an entourage of 1243 hangers-on and security people and official photographers, audio recordists and sculptors, apologize sincerely for crushing a number of hapless well-wishers along the first “Lady’s” skidding path;

FRiday, deliver a speech insulting the Pope and all the saints, and complimenting the forbearance of the Islamic world in view of the centuries of oppression by their neighbors, especially Christians, sign a 10,000-page bill promoting the use of BEAN-O to prevent human flatulence from aggravating the accumulation of greenhouse gasses, and funding a new international commission to promote Palestinian research into more effective anti-flatulants for goats;

Saturday, sign a 500-volume bill establishing a new cabinet level Secretary of CASH-FOR-CLUNKERS, funding a United Nations commission to study the possibility of outlawing the use of private vehicles by non-governmental persons, Appoint a Cash-for-Clunkers Czar, issue an executive order for the National Cathedral to be re-purposed as the new headquarters for the Department of Cash-for-Clunkers.

Sunday, relax with a game of bare-chested basketball with a crowd of photographers from the obsequious media dutifully snapping images of the president’s foes fumbling, and the president’s shots magically swishing through the net, even if the images have to be Photoshopped.

Well, I hope someone got a chuckle…

Seriously, for the strategy to be effective, a whole bunch of states would have to have a bunch of their agencies go refuse-nik all simultaneously. Otherwise, legal or no, the FEDS would concentrate their sincerest annoyed-reaction on one courageous state official at a time. By Saturation action coming from all points of the compass, the EVIL Bastids might be overwhelmed.

By the Way… Has anyone heard anything about the Oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in the last few days? Or did I go to sleep and wake up in an alternate universe where there never was an OIL DISASTER of unprecedented dimension and incalculable damage to the entire flipping world that could only be fixed by outlawing the use of petroleum by Americans ever ever ever ever ever again?

Papa Ray said: “I’m not sure how much I will ever post here again. I’m getting the feeling that this place is nothing more than an echo chamber and that some that post are not willing to work, fight or die for their high fa-luting words and ideals.”

Now you get it. They be ‘pickin’ pepper….’

Sheep not sheepdogs and I think some wolves.

Buy more ammo and canned goods.

And what makes you think there will be elections this fall? Or if they are carried out that they will be honest? I doubt they will or that they would be.

You can take things into your hands if you understand you have the key. Even if public officials do commit criminal acts they are more than likely part of the local power structure, and they aren’t going to be prosecuted.

But that isn’t the end of it. With very rare exceptions if you’re the victim of a crime you have the right to sue the criminal. And that applies to public officials.

Back in the day when I practiced law in Austin, Texas it was almost impossible to find parking anywhere near the Travis County courthouse, and there were parking meters that were horribly expensive and you couldn’t load them up for more than an hour. Needless to say, I racked up a lot of them and at some point I just starting throwing them away, especially when I found out that the meters in certain locations were themselves illegal as no ordinance had ever been passed to permit their installation. The officials knew this but their position was “if you don’t like it take it to court.”

One day I came back from the Court House to find my car being towed away for non-payment of parking tickets. I delivered a letter to the City Clerk informing him that he was in violation of the Texas statute regarding Official Oppression, which amongst other things made it illegal for a “public servant” to seize someone’s property when they knew they had no legal right to do so. I let him know that I had filed a criminal complaint against him, and that I knew it would go nowhere, but I was prepared to file a civil suit against him up front and personally for violation of that law and take it to a jury trial unless the car was returned to my office no later than five o’clock that day.

They called my office and said I could pick the car up from the tow yard. My secretary told them to go f*ck themselves and they better deliver the car to the office no later than five o’clock or else. They did, and they paid me rental for the car.

The moral of the story is that you can use the same rules they are using to screw you to screw them. Its all about tactics.

RagD, it’s hard to tell. I do some politikn locally but I don’t think it matters. First because I’m preaching to the choir, second because talking ’bout revolution is one thing, hunting down ACORN or ACLU members is another.
That is why I stress timing. If I were to get some fellas together and start shooting people tomorrow, the Cops would get upset. Since the cops are basically on my side, I am willing to wait until the Ft.Sumter moment has arrived. Then the cops will help me with my target list. I will help them with their target list and everybody will be happy. ‘cept maybe the targets, but they really don’t matter once they are serviced.
The 4th world is used to fixing elections so they are counting on being able to fix them again in Nov. There are limits to how many dead can vote. If Conservatives can get enough turn out, then we might just blow thru the dead vote and the multiple voters. Not sure what can be done about the boxes found in the back seat of the car scam.
I think the only thing that will fix that is impeaching some judges.
We still have to try. We owe it to our grandchildren to make every effort to follow the Law before we start crossing names off the list. No matter how dishonest that law is. Meanwhile; BUY MORE AMMO!

“Law is the embodiment of the moral sentiment of the people.”
William Blackstone
English jurist (1723 – 1780)

“The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.”
Frank Zappa
US musician, singer, & songwriter (1940 – 1993)

“I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
US black civil rights leader & clergyman (1929 – 1968)

This is what I say, again, note it’s ineffective. My state breaks things down into general revenues and non-general revenues. Federal grants fall into the non-general category. Currently we are at about 50/50 general/non-general that account for total revenues. Federal subsidies and grants make up about 40% of the non-general side. Most of that federal money winds up in three areas: health care, highway funds, and education. They pay us to maintain their health care mandates, to maintain their highways, and to give them more control over our education. So, what I say to folks is:

1) the overall effect of these monies is to weaken the state government, to make it more dependent on the feds and to force it to become more compliant to federal wishes.
2) the GOP has recently been just as bad as the Dems on this situation.
3) all federal money comes with strings. You take it, you have to do things their way.
4) it is very hard for states not to take it. When citizens find out the feds are holding a pot of money out for them, they will become outraged if the state even hesitates on seizing it.
5) over time the amount of “strings” attached to federal grants becomes larger. Like a drug dealer, they hook the state with a sample until a dependency is created. Then increased demands come with the money.
6) the time has passed to begin forcing expectations back on the feds and frustrating the encroachment of federal powers here. For putting blame where it needs to lie. For example: why is the I95 South corridor out of NoVa so messed up and clogged with traffic despite the millions and millions of dollars we’ve dropped on it? Simple: look how they made us implement it, with all their stupid HOV lanes, their idiotic bridge and bypass designs, all the wasted space that could make for more traffic lanes.

Look, at the first sentence of Treasure Island. (here it is: “SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.”) The book is a children’s book that no child in our public school system can read today. 200 pages of that? It is too hard for anything before high school. Yet our grandparents were reading it as young-uns in the old one room schoolhouses. Why can’t they read it in the expensive new elementary schools with all the latest equipment and teaching staffs with Masters degrees in education? How come only the homeschoolers who don’t go there can read it?

Then, where to begin on health care? It’s a story with a common theme to the transportation and the education problems. We’re spending more and more on it, and getting less and less to show for it. The feds once again inflate the costs, inject layers of bureaucracy, isolate the works from scrutiny and thereby introduce fraud, and rain down edicts and regulations that hamper doing the actual job.

The goals of getting you home from work in a timely fashion, of getting your kids educated, and of keeping you healthy are only the means for one thing: increasing their turf. That comes before solving these problems. Worst thing ever, in fact, is solving these problems. That’d destroy the rationale to demand more money and more personnel for the next budget.

These feds who come around flashing $100 bills on the street corner, they aren’t your friends. That’s what I tell people around here. Doesn’t win anybody over. Despite the fact that everybody around here is part of the problem, where do I go wrong with it?

My apologies to Wretchard for burning up his bandwidth. But really, despite what anyone says, the only thing that get the attention of the current American Political Class is to propose an Article V convention that will sweep them away. The amendments proposed? My take on the essentials is as follows:1. The power of Congress to pass laws regulating interstate commerce shall be limited to regulating the States in regards to tangible goods that actually pass across State borders. It does not extend to any activities that occur solely within the borders of any state. The power is limited to forbidding the acts of a State in regards to goods that actually flow across its borders. It does not extend to compelling the acts or laws of any State, nor does it extend to prohibiting or compelling acts of any individual citizen of the United States.

2. Congress may not pass any law that delegates power to the executive branch to make rules to implement vague or uncertain directives. No penalties, civil or criminal, may be levied upon anyone unless it is a direct violation of the laws passed by the Congress. And all laws passed by Congress shall be subject to the test that any law which is so vague that people of reasonable intelligence cannot ascertain from the plain wording of the statute what behavior is prohibited or required is wholly null and void in its entirety.

3. No money shall be paid from the treasury of the United States to any one or any entity, State or otherwise, for any purpose other than for the exchange of goods, services, or property actually rendered or given, with the sole exception of paying damages done to citizens of the United States that were caused to them by the negligence or malice of its servants.

To the extent that such expenditures are currently being paid, they shall continue for a period of fifteen years after the adoption of this amendment. However, the total amount of money available for all entitlement programs shall be reduced by 8% per year, irrespective of inflation, until the fifteen year period ends.

4. All taxes shall be equal in that there will be no discrimination in their application based upon the relative wealth, income or status of the individual. The notion of “progressive” taxation to fund the Federal Government is hereby abolished.

5. No person may serve more than two terms in the Senate. No person may serve more than three terms in the House of Representatives.

6. Upon resolutions passed by the Legislatures of two thirds of the States any Federal Official, be they members of the Legislative, Judicial, or Executive branch, will be removed from office immediately and will forever be barred from holding any position in the Federal Government again.

You might disagree with all of it, but the plain fact is that the current political class needs to have a gun held up to its head.

Its time to raise the Jolly Roger. Take a position and urge your State Legislatures to call for an Article V convention. It totally circumvents the Feds, and that will scare them more than anything. If its done, they won’t have a place at the table but they may be on the menu.

Well, apart from Mike Rowe, the entertainment portion kinda fell apart right after I posted the link, at least for non-Scouters. Even I went to bed early.

But for a Scouter who knows what those young men learn in the program, it was wonderful to see them all in one place reaffirming their commitment to the old values. Unlike public school, Scout meetings are places where boys can uninhibitedly declare their love of country, of the flag, of our heritage, and traditional values like honor, etc.

And yes, just like Brad Pitt’s “Boy Scout” character in “Spy Game,” these boys’ idealism will be sorely tested by the world. Thanks to Scouting, most of them will have a very solid foundation from which to wage that fight. And yes, they learn to shoot.

I don’t live in the U.S. for most of the year, otherwise I’d be doing what Papa Ray is doing. I think we’re living through a situation that no American in our lifetime has ever before encountered, one where it is clear that the people governing the nation hate what it is and are trying to destroy it despite the wishes of a majority of its inhabitants.

For me, the political has now turned deeply personal. I found myself recently in a position where I was expected to accommodate some people from a charitable organization for an overnight stay. They have a well-known relative who is a Democrat. I didn’t know about these people, but when I found their relative had that contemptible affiliation, I decided immediately that a)the first thing I would do was ask them about it, and b) if they shared that affiliation, they would not be spending any time under my roof. However, it turned out that they weren’t Democrats and thought their relative, in that area, was completely clueless.

I’m just absolutely, thoroughly sick of the lying leftist bastards and I’ve reached the end of my patience with them. There probably aren’t 100 of the 535 plus 10 in DC whose hand I would be willing to shake. I now understand, in a way I never truly did before, how the Spanish Civil War ended up with so many (I’ve read 60+%) of the casualties being people who were executed after capture. Both sides came to realize that the other side was never going to be converted ideologically, so the best thing to do was to convert them physically–into fertilizer.

The left has made it brutally clear that they hate my race, my gender, my sexual orientation and my conservative political ideology. They actually even resent the fact that I’m still breathing. The only good they see coming from me is to send them tax money up to the point where they can train a woman or a minority to take my place. After that I’m just a contemptible “useless eater” whose face they would love to shove through a plate-glass window.

There is no negotiating with people like that. It’s already well past that point. They’ve long since made it clear that they will respond to nothing but violence or the very credible threat of it, so that is what it will take. Make no mistake, it’s going to be damned difficult to beat them. If you look at those who signed the Declaration of Independence, most of those who fought ended up broke, if not dead. They certainly didn’t benefit economically from fighting the oppressor. I doubt many of those who fight this tyranny will either. The costs in both life and property will be quite high. However, that is probably the price we have to pay because too many of us failed to be vigilant when we should have been and the costs of inaction now will be unbearable.

I’ll second what many on here keep saying: buy more ammo. I’ll add something else, too: get FAMILIAR with your weaponry and know how to use it under pressure. Learn how to make it work even if you’re wounded. Practice shooting a pistol with your weak hand. Learn how to rack the slide on an automatic with only one hand. Buy a set of body armor if you can and start investigating suppressor technology. Most of all, adopt the mindset that if you’re going to have to give “the last full measure of devotion” in an attempt to save your country, you owe it to yourself and your posterity to prepare for obtaining the maximum return on your sacrifice.

After watching Socialism at work for a Decade or so, C. Northcote Parkinson came up with Parkinson’s Law back 1955. Interestingly, it was in an essay in the Economist — and I am not sure they would print it today.

This is from Wikipedia.

Much of the essay is dedicated to a summary of purportedly scientific observations supporting his law, such as the increase in the number of employees at the Colonial Office while Great Britain’s overseas empire declined (indeed, he shows that the Colonial Office had its greatest number of staff at the point when it was folded into the Foreign Office because of a lack of colonies to administer). He explains this growth by two forces: (1) “An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals” and (2) “Officials make work for each other.” He notes in particular that the total of those employed inside a bureaucracy rose by 5-7% per year “irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done.”

Observing DC recently, I might add some corollaries of my own, as they apply to the bureaucratic retainer class of our ruling class.

1. Power is the god of bureaucrats and regulations are their idols.

2. What bureaucracies don’t do they prevent getting done.

So: A bureaucracy that does not effectively respond to the gulf oil spill will prevent others from responding effectively; Bureaucrats who are slackers at enforcing immigration laws are fanatics when preventing others from enforcing them; Bureaucrats who decide your disease is inconvenient to cure will prevent you from curing it; and so on and on and on.

At the same time regulation has gone beyond sexy and become a fetish — lawyerly pornography that make the smut kings wealthy. So you have to obey every regulation (and be thankful for them) unless your powers are god-lite — in which case you can walk across the turbulent Sea of Forms until you reach your destination.

You make a good case — functionally — for pushing power down to a lower level. I had never thought about the comparison of the population between, say, Houston today and the entire USA at independence.

However, it would be better to start with the US Constitutional approach (paraphrased) — power resides in the people, now and forever. The people can choose to delegate certain powers to a level of government, and the people always retain the right to take those powers back.

You may call that “subsidiarity”, L3, and you may have good historical reasons for doing so. But in the modern world, “subsidiarity” has been stolen by the statists of the European Union. They not only stole the word, they reversed the meaning to the one that even you adopted: “we need to push authority much further down than the states”, i.e. authority belongs to the Center, who may deign to push it down to the peons.

George Orwell wrote extensively about the corruption of language. At the moment, the worst kind of EU/UN Neo-Stalinist could agree wholeheartedly with L3 on the need for “subsidiarity”, but would mean the opposite of what L3 means.

Power and money are intimately related. If we want an expanded federalism, we need to re-orient the money flows. Instead of money going directly to the center to dole out with strings attached, the money needs to go to the lowest governmental level (be that State or city), with any other level of government limited only to taxing the governmental level immediately below it.

Look at how the US Congress (for all its many faults) was able for years to reduce the damage done by the Neo-Stalinists of the UN by simply refusing to allocate money to it.

57. Tcobb:
I haven’t agreed with the Article V Convention up until now, but I’m slowly warming to the idea; as long as there is no chance of them going rogue and rewriting the whole document.

Since we’re compiling a wish list, I offer the following additions:

1. Repeal the 17th Amendment (and maybe the 16th as well).

2. Lawyers should be allowed to serve only in the Judicial branch of government. Anybody with a law degree would be ineligible to serve in the Legislative or Executive branches. That restriction is hardly unfair or burdensome, since lawyers would still have one entire branch of government to call their own. No other profession or trade has that.

This would help to reduce the disproportionate power of lawyers over our society. Legislative bodies would become more diverse and would better represent the society at large, and the Executive would be more likely to be someone with actual executive experience. It would also aid in ensuring that laws are written in a way that a normal, intelligent person could understand. The professional lawyers in the Judicial branch would serve as an important check in case the citizen-legislators get carried away and pass unconstitutional laws.

mac #61
“I’ll second what many on here keep saying: buy more ammo. I’ll add something else, too: get FAMILIAR with your weaponry and know how to use it under pressure. Learn how to make it work even if you’re wounded. Practice shooting a pistol with your weak hand. Learn how to rack the slide on an automatic with only one hand. Buy a set of body armor if you can and start investigating suppressor technology. Most of all, adopt the mindset that if you’re going to have to give “the last full measure of devotion” in an attempt to save your country, you owe it to yourself and your posterity to prepare for obtaining the maximum return on your sacrifice.”

Excellent advice.

Night Vision if you can find a way to afford it, a rangefinder, good binoculars, and a decent spotting scope all have uses way beyond shooting.

Words on paper, even great words, are no protection against evil and corruption. The only protection against evil men weilding power is to keep them from sitting in the seats of power. Bureaucracies – since we’re on the subject – are full of words, full of rules intended to make sure things function without greed or corruption. But those rules are like gun control laws – the only people who follow them are the ones who don’t need the rules in the first place.

L3 has the right general approach – though I can’t say yet if I agree 100% with the details, the strategy is right. Focus on electing people to power who will aggressively undo what the Neobility has done over the last century. Ignore referendum, initiatives, ignore all words on scraps of paper. Focus on then men and women in power. Put our people in office. Assert our power to wreck the bureacracy and delegitimize their power.

L3 has the right general approach – though I can’t say yet if I agree 100% with the details, the strategy is right. Focus on electing people to power who will aggressively undo what the Neobility has done over the last century. Ignore referendum, initiatives, ignore all words on scraps of paper. Focus on then men and women in power. Put our people in office.

Hear, Hear! And let me add how easy it is to access your local representatives. I see the Speaker of my state legislature on a regular basis at local political events and they know me. I’m a nobody socially and financially. But I go to the meetings; I put in time with the local party.

Seriously, most people don’t understand JUST HOW FEW PEOPLE ELECT PARTY OFFICIALS AND BIGWIGS, AND MAKE THE LOCAL PARTY RUN. Don’t believe me? Then watch for the announcement of a local party picnic. Attend that picnic. You will see the same damn crowd there all the time. And you’ll see the bigwigs in a different light. You’ve seen them looking official and powerful on the front of your local newspaper, but have you seen them accidentally squeeze mustard on their tie instead of their hot dog? Or get their nice suit coat sleeve wet while rooting around for a coke in a tub of ice? They are human and unlike the arrogant Congressional *ssholes we’ve seen on video who grab or snarl, state and local officials know the county municipal building or state capital is not so far away they can escape the rubes after recess.

Dang, thanks for your interest and understanding. Up to now it’s only been the women in my life that have recognized my assets and abilities.

BTW, I did send Tamquam what he asked for and do hope that he does find the opportunity to use it. But since I sent it in OpenOffice, so not sure if he can read it if he is using bill gates stuff.

It is not much and sure not anything much new. I’m not a community organizer nor a whiz at selling anything . I’m just an old Texan doing what I can.

Today I told the girls it was my day off. I ain’t doing nothing, sandwiches for lunch, pizza for supper and they get to feed our dog and the 2 kittens that we have adopted [against my wishes don't you know and don't worry, I will get them fixed, this area has enough cats]. But I still have to do some chores today.

I will still read here I’m sure – time to time – but I’m still not convinced that many here want to do more than stay in their bubble and type. That will be our downfall if most Americans stay in their little bubble that they think will continue to be safe, because it damn sure isn’t.

Prove me wrong.

Papa RayP.S. here is the website of one of my buds who is a civilian who is in Afghanistan right now. I ask that you give him your support, not money [but that would be nice] but otherwise. He lost his son to the wars and is looking for the truth, much as I have been looking for many years.

Next step would be to convince Dr. Victor Davis Hanson to run for President in 2012 and have a unifed and concerted effort among conservative Americans to elect him, an intellectual, a patriot, a non-politician, uncorruptable and a man who exudes the attributes of quiet and effective leadership that would be directed toward restoring the greatness of the concept and the reality of a Constitutional Republic, a “shining city on a hill” and a beacon of light for the world.

Not only the next step, but the best step for America and perhaps the last.

I think Mike Rowe’s message is the inherent dignity of any & all productive work. He may crack jokes and jape with his crew, but he has never denigrated the most surly of tasks, and, contrarily, has enthused about each and every one of them and the people who do them.
This show should be required viewing for high school students across the country, to show what real work is like, and to demonstrate that the meanest of occupations has its value to the working of society.
Years ago, wire brushing a mud drum on a Sumner class, I realized the fear I had of tight spaces. I could no longer do what Mike does, and I respect his enthusiasm and courage to do stuff that I cannot even stand to watch being done. Window washing a ‘scraper in Hawaii: OMG!

L3 @ 65 on “subsidiarity” (in the original pre-Leftist meaning of the word): “why abandon yet another important word to the Left”

My only regret (currently) is that I was not there at the Alamo. We all have to die sometime, and there is much to be said for giving our deaths meaning.

But it would serve no purpose for me to borrow Pappa Ray’s musket & Bowie knive and head off to the Alamo today. It was over-run, and time has moved on.

Same with “subsidiarity”. That battle is over, and our side lost. To our shame, our side did not even put up a fight. “Subsidiarity” now means what the EU Neo-Stalinists say it means — a limited reversible delegation by the center of rather unimportant authorities to the peons on the periphery, with the peons demonstrating appropriate appreciation for the magnaminity of their betters at the center.

It is over. Words re for communication, and there is no value in a word which means diametrically-opposed things to different people.

You make an excellent case, L3, that the world today needs to go beyond “Federalism”. A State with 30+ million people is itself too large for meaningful self-government. We need to develop a new word to describe government by the people, for the people — with each layer of government above that being dependent on the preceeding layer of government for its financial support and for its limited revokable authority.

On the bureaucratic front, I’ve often wondered why we don’t cash incentivise them. For example, let’s say that in 2010 the Junior Sub Department Of Potato Scrubbing, which consists of 500 people, comes in $2 million below budget. Well, of that two million, half goes back to the government, and the other half is given as tax-free bonuses to those 500 people, or $2,000 each. The following year their budget is reduced by the amount of that surplus, or $2M. Now they are again challenged to cut their spending if they want to see more money in their own pockets.

You might start to see everyone in the department suddenly questioning every spending move. We’re sending 10 people on a junket to Vegas for the Potato Convention again? Why? We know damn well all they did there last year was get drunk on the government tab and over-run our travel budget. We’re still buying paper and pens from the Boss’s brother-in-law at twice the price? Not any more.

What you would have would be internal conflicts over spending, because suddenly for every employee it’s “their money” that somebody else wants to spend. Taking office supplies home wouldn’t be a wink-wink situation anymore, but a “stop stealing from me” situation. Scammers would be outed and peer pressure would get people into line. Even better, they would have a huge incentive to cut staff, or to at least not hire anyone new. Attrition would take its natural course.

Also, for those involved in social services, they would be much less eager to hand out services to people who don’t really need them, or who aren’t eligible (e.g. illegals), because it’s money out of their pockets.

Maybe this is too simple and I’m missing something, but I think this could save a lot of money, though you’d have to implement across sub-groups within agencies, not the entire agency together. That would diffuse the impact too much and people would just figure they’ll let someone else worry about it.

Naturally, I don’t expect anything like this to happen, especially with the Feds. But an enterprising state government might try it. Considering the massive amounts of waste and fraud that go on, the savings could be huge (as could the earnings to the people in the organizations).

I will still read here I’m sure – time to time – but I’m still not convinced that many here want to do more than stay in their bubble and type.

A few things worth keeping in mind for all those on the front line:

1. Don’t assume that everyone has to do what you do to contribute to the success of the movement. There are many forms of sainthood; not everyone needs to be a Mother Teresa. Even the greatest warriors relied on many non-warriors to keep them supplied.

2. Those who have a different calling are often inspired in their work by the stories of the warriors on the front. Don’t shortchange their contribution by refusing to share your own. Your stories to make a difference.

3. Specifically with respect to the Belmont Club, my guess is that there are about 100 readers to every writer, and many of those are men of action. Your impact is far greater than you may think. Don’t give up the bully pulpit too quickly.

Perhaps you’re right. History alone will tell. Until a better word comes along, I’ll hang on to my “losing cause.” There may yet be a Battle of San Jacinto. After all, 99.9% of the world has never even heard the word. And I’ll put my centuries of Scholastics up against your jeanny-come-lately Neo-Stalinists.

In the meantime, I suppose we’ll just agree to disagree. There’s still plenty we agree on, and lots work to do. But if we meet someday, first drink’s on me.

The main problem revolves around the very legitimacy of the system. Cracks are appearing everywhere and not just in the US. We all play the game that is called society, but we will quit playing when we can no longer pretend that the game isn’t rigged in the other guy’s favor, and that its all a farce.

We can talk about local involvement in politics, and we should, but if the new players are simply part of the old machine who just haven’t had “their turn” yet it will avail us nothing. It will be replacing a burnt out fuse with another burnt out fuse.

And contrary to what others have said, words and rules do have meaning. The problem we have is that the original meanings of the words and concepts have been bent over time into shapes that are unrecognizable from their original forms. As for me I advocate an Article V convention not so much as to replace the Constitution, but rather to restore it to its original meaning and limits, and to do this with clear and unambiguous language. We need a lot more “The government shalt not…s.” It is necessary. And yes, the powers that be will immediately set out to twist the meanings, but this does take time.

If you try to invent a rule in the midst of a high stakes poker game in which your two pair beat your opponents full house because your middle initial is “C” and its Saturday it will end up getting you shot. You have to work that kind of thing in very slowly in order for anybody to buy it.

Many of us work for employers who will punish an employee whose politics are discovered to be conservative. Many more are subject to harassment and “denunciation” by fellow employees who have loudly announced their support for Obama. Still more of us have neighbors who have made it clear in conversations that they are hostile to conservatives.

I don’t know what the solution is for that, especially for folks who have dependents whose lives would be profoundly distressed by the loss of employment for the primary income-earner.

I think the tipping point for most people is the moment they realize that they are screwed if they fail to resist, just as much as if they open their mouths to express opposition.

For a lot of folks, that moment arrived sometime in the autumn of 2008. But going public with their alarm/disgust/antagonism would have consequences ranging from unpleasant to disastrous, so many folks have “gone underground” speaking quietly to people they trust, making purchases consistent with 2nd amendment, stocking up on non-perishable foods… PREPARING for interruptions to services.

More to the point, people seem to be quietly linking up with like-minded friends and neighbors.

Most of the self-identified liberals I’ve met in any social context – barbecues, work, church, concerts, restaurants, etc. – have been almost invariably contemptuous and insulting to anyone who disagrees with them about politics. At the same time, they take offense at any challenge to their beliefs and dogma, and shout down any attempt to apply logical analysis. Facts which would contradict their delusions are automatically dismissed as lies or fallacies.

In the last decade, I have had only ONE SINGLE instance of having a civil conversation with a self-described liberal after introducing any recognizably conservative statement, or after introducing myself as a conservative.

On the other hand…

Seems to me a few years back, a conservative working in a Hollywood production was pushed by a liberal co-worker to declare himself. The result of the liberal’s aggressive attack was that a number of other members of the crew came to the defense of the conservative. In fact, they found that after years of keeping silent on film sets and job sites for fear of ostracism or blacklisting, that at least this particular production crew actually had more conservatives than liberals. (I think this story came through Bill Whittle’s blog Ejectejecteject.com.)

Maybe the lesson to take from that is that the Liberals who behave that way are just typical bullies, who collapse and wet their pants when anyone they try to intimidate shows a little fiber.

I remember a comment from someone that really captured the essence of the Silicon Valley worthless managers:

“That guy thinks thinks a meeting was successful as long as he kept anyone from shouting.”

First off, a comment on the Article V Convention proposal. Looking into it further, I have come to the conclusion that the variation for selecting Convention delegates varies so widely from State to State that it would be an invitation to chaos. Secondly, there is no restriction on what constitutes an amendment. The 21st amendment, for example, simply abolished the 18th. So a new amendment could simply abolish any part of, or even the entire Constitution. As someone already pointed out, this is what the original framers did with the Articles of Confederation. So my bottom line is that I have no confidence that such a convention would not be hijacked and put to destructive purpose.

Next, as to Tcobb’s and Cowboy’s “give them a dose of their own medicine” prescriptions, I do not think this will happen. Even the strongest conservatives of the past 100 years have been unable and unwilling to do this. For one thing, conservatives have a greater appreciation of precedent and procedure than the left does. For another, even Reagan wasn’t Thatcher when it came to domestic matters. And Thatcher’s rollbacks didn’t last. All the “dose of their own medicine” will do is embolden the left to up the ante the next time they are in power. Tempting as it is, I doubt it will ever come to pass successfully.

Third, Cowboy’s #56 post goes to the heart of the matter. Society has been dumbed down and deviance has been defined down for so long that many, perhaps most people lack the clarity of logic or the knowledge of history to recognize what is happening. I just spent the weekend with my sister and brother-in-law. My sister is a center to center-left liberal. My brother-in-law is a very smart man and he and I were able to have several reasonable and edifying conversations, but he is a clear leftist who fancies himself to be a center-left liberal – a reasonable assumption given that he lives in Berkeley. Perhaps in his crowd he is one of the more centrist folks.

What came out of our discussions was my realization that despite mutual respect and a willingness to listen to each other, the divide between our worldviews was unbridgeable. Each of us appeared to the other to be over exaggerating the lunatic fringe on the other’s side and minimizing the lunacy on our own side. Characteristic of left leaning thinking, he was generally optimistic about the benefits of the changes his side wanted, and doubtful of the unintended side-effects, while I, temperamentally more conservative, worried about those potential dangers and gave them more weight. To nearly every bad scenario I came up with for things that could go wrong, he reassured himself that some new work around or fix would be proposed. All my cautions were dismissed as over wrought. My conservative notion that the quest for perfection and utopia almost always brings untold misery was dismissed by him as too Cassandra like. And all this was from a thoughtful and very well educated relative with whom I could have a friendly conversation.

When it comes to most others I know, the ability to proceed in a logical fashion is few and far between. When I reflect on the students I teach in Medical School I find that they are wonderful well-meaning individuals who have a real sense of dedication to making people better. But they have virtually no ability to see beyond their own views. In one of my courses we discuss all the non-book learned doctoring skills. They have such superficial thinking it is alarming. These are great kids who simply lack the ability to go beyond their personal views to consider the consequences that might ensue if their proposals were to become generally applied. They know how to go from point A to point B but they have no concept of the alphabet, so to speak. And the algorithm style of medicine that is taught under the slogan of “evidence based medicine” makes it worse. They know how to think in a digital fashion and have lost the analogue capacity to see beyond moment to moment, one item at a time.

Finally, I will end with a brief joke. Three men were set to be executed by guillotine. The first proclaimed his innocence and when his head was placed on the block, the guillotine stopped two inches above his neck. The rules were that no one was to be subjected twice to beheading, so he was freed. Then the second said he was guilty, but that it was society’s fault. For him too the guillotine stopped two inches above his neck and he too was set free. The third man stepped forward and said, “I’m a Republican and I must let you know that there is a knot in the rope.”

Yes–tipping points come and sometimes the changes that follow can come with astonishing speed. How many young people today realize that the red, red southern states were once known as the “solid south” for their support of the Democratic party. How quickly that changed.

And it is interesting now how many people claim that they don’t remember who they voted for in the last Presidential election. As I’ve said many times before for many people the political stances they take are nothing more than fashion statements. They are something you absorb from the people around you and espouse in order to be cool. It isn’t even skin deep. Its often much shallower than that.

And fashion can change and die fairly quickly especially if there are up close and personal consequences involved. Wearing a mini-skirt outdoors in Antarctica in the midst of winter carries its own punishment.

As many people are beginning to see, so does following the banner of Obama and the current crop of the Democratic party.

What needs to happen is the creation of budget carnivores that live off of job positions.

Job slots not filled within nine months come up for internal auction: normally the position is to be killed. The agency must be trying to hire a unicorn.

Additionally: all current employees get a crack at new job openings ONLY after the job has been presented to non-governmental citizens for at least six months. This would stop most citizens from investing their life into government sitzkrieg.

As it stands, internal promotions first creates a us-vs-them mentality with regard to privately employed citizens. It also allows ass-kissing supplicants to rise forever in their incompetence; until their last years which establish a retirement check as if their whole life was hyper-productive to the nation’s citizens.

The fresh blood would be something to behold. Further, it would choke off bums from internal promotion.

BTW, in most private labor markets internally promoted employees are those who have NOT hit their Peter-Principle niche.

In contrast, it is extremely common for bureaucrats to lie and push losers up and out of their departments. That’s a bureaucrats way of firing someone.

Finally, during times of economic stress and falling wages throughout the economy all government payrolls follow suit: wages are incremented DOWN and all promotions occur ( if any ) WITHOUT WAGE increases for the affected individuals.

This mirrors the wage practices of the private sector almost completely.

As it stands, all state employees should be put on systemic wage cuts of 5% per annum across the board until finances balance out. This trim is to extend to pension terms as well. This reflects that we are in a chronically deflating environment and that maintaining ones job with ONLY a wage trim is doing much better than the average citizen.

Any government employee who can not live with the wage trim is free at any time to enter the private market.

Contract management employees are to be terminated as fast as possible. Invariably these are people who are double dipping — having already started their retirement draw. Such arrangements are to be prohibited by law, ASAP.

The amount of money going out the door to double and triple dippers would astound you. Out in California we have top dippers retiring over and over again. Once they are in their fifties, they can retire from one state job after the other and stack up the retirement checks. ( State, County, City, District all not recognizing that the pillager is taking down ultra-fat retirement income from multiple accounts and separate union locals!

Bell is not the only municipality that has completely corrupted payroll accounts.

As for work tempo: most such employees work in the style of seventy years ago — sitting on their tushes, trading phone calls and playing phone tag. Whatever it takes to stay awake and kill the clock.

If you doubt me, camp out sometime at your local County government center.

With no disrespect intended, it continues to amaze me how people will not read the Constitution about how an Article V convention works. If such a convention was convened no matter what they come up with does not mean that suddenly that is the law of the land. Their proposals, however radical, must still be ratified by the legislatures of three-quarters of the States. (this is not altogether accurate, but it can, and should, be set up this way) In effect it is no different than having the Congress proposing a Constitutional Amendment. The only distinction is WHO proposes the Constitutional Amendment(s). The requirements for passing it or them are the SAME.

I put in the link above to the book “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference” by Malcolm Gladwell ISBN-13: 978-0316346627. It seems to provide great insight into how a lot of human/social relationships respond to small changes in similar ways.

The author looks at factors that seemed to be at the root of such diverse things as an explosion in Syphilis cases in Baltimore, the sudden dramatic drop in violent crimes in New York City, sudden increase in teenage out-of-wedlock pregnancies, etc. It seems (without having gotten more than a couple of chapters in) to be remarkably free of the taint of spitting screaming political dogma, looking at a range of ideas and contributing ideas and themes.

Tcobb, no offense taken. I understand fully what you are saying. A Constitutional Convention merely approves a document that must be ratified. Where I appear to be more skeptical than you is to fear that such a convention will be hijacked. I can even imagine that the Supreme Court might engage in something at their level akin to jury nullification and declare Article V itself unconstitutional — and get away with it. The current administration has demonstrated that constitutional restraints and procedural precedents mean nothing to them if utopia is on their horizon.

Consider it from the prospective of game theory. The best way to optimize personal rewards under such a system would be to do nothing at all. This would entail no expenditures except for salaries of the bureaucracy and would give the highest monetary returns at the end of the year in terms of bonuses.

But … at the same time it would mean that the bureaucracies would essentially be like a cancer that is feeding upon itself until finally it dies.

s @ 79: In the last decade, I have had only ONE SINGLE instance of having a civil conversation with a self-described liberal after introducing any recognizably conservative statement, or after introducing myself as a conservative.

Oh, I’ve done better than that, went to lunch regularly with a guy, smart guy in real life but a total knee-jerk liberal politically, I told him time and again he didn’t even have any political opinions, just pathologies. He asked why I would say such a thing when he was being (semi-)polite to me, and I told him it was only the truth. From time to time I made tiny amounts of headway with him, but he’d backslide immediately of course.

87 Josh; For what little it may be worth, the times I have been most successful in having discussions with those on the left have required first that I establish that I want the same ultimate good goal that they do. For example, I might say, “I want the poor to be more prosperous.” Or I might say, “Don’t you and I both seek to help the downtrodden?” Or, “We both want women and minorities to have the ability to rise to their maximum potential, don’t we?”

Once we establish that basic agreement I can say that we are simply debating which methods work best. That way I can point to the superiority of freedom to statism, or demonstrate that welfare infantilizes its recipients, or that if one really wants to uphold women’s rights, one must oppose Islamists. Of course, this doesn’t always work, but it frequently gives them pause.

Some years ago I went to a meeting celebrating the 75th anniversary of the top journal in my field. It was an internationally circulated journal so the meeting was attended by people from all over the world. It was held in a beautiful conference room on the campus of West Point. At lunch that first day I was sitting next to a woman with a foreign accent. It happened that she was an American who had emigrated to the US in the late 1930′s. She complained at how inappropriate it was to be holding a meeting on a campus that was part of the military industrial complex. I listened politely and with great interest and said, “If it were not for the graduates of West Point you and your family would not have had a country to emigrate to and would have suffered the fate of your relatives left behind.” She said, “I’ve never thought of it that way.” Amazing.

And I understand where you are coming from. But really this wouldn’t be an altogether bad thing. If the rule of law is an illusion then let it be broken, and let the buzzards who pretended to be eagles be shown for what they are. Once the illusion is broken the path becomes clear.

The Constitutional Convention met because New York and Pennsylvania were chronically at the edge of war based upon commercial spite.

For those unaware: the liberated colonies practiced their own trade policies — particularly with reference to tariffs against rival manufactures and trade goods of their most immediate neighbors.

Further, they endeavored to coin their own minor denominations and even issue notes against State credit. All of this was done for ‘good’ reasons. Just ask the politicians.

It is notable that the Constitution addressed all of these items early on: a Federal government was to take over all of these issues and powers. Most specifically, intra-colonial tariffs were forever wiped out.

—–

The next Constitutional Convention when and however convened will do so because of economic nightmare: the budget will have finally blown up.

The number one source of our bloated ‘do-better’ class is unlimited funding. Some mechanism will have to be constructed to forever choke the Congress inre pork and the unelected law-makers will have to be corralled.

The EPA is the Blob. We need to chill it out.

AA needs to be terminated with extreme prejudice. It’s as racist as Jim Crow. One would have thought Jim Crow would have been example enough. As it stands, the Feds have created a run-away positive feed-back engine of racial spoils and grievance. The immoral hazard of race-baiting as a profession — Federally funded — is like setting Simon Legree loose upon the modern populace.

The Energy Department is almost entirely a slush fund for connected contractors and manufacturers. There is almost nothing it does that private capital would not do cheaper and faster.

The Education Department has been totally captured by the teachers. In return, the teachers’ off-hours have been taken by the Feds. You simply cannot comprehend the amount of teacher labor spent stuffing the Feds maw with forms and reports. Rather like the Stasi, these are filed, and filed, and filed. Someday, when the Department needs to justify its mega-staff the forest of files can be unleashed.

As for NASA, its budget ought to be farmed out to private industry and treated much more in the manner of the DoD procurement. There is the advantage that the planets are not trying to counter-develop technology to thwart our engineers. It is impossible for me to believe that ANY private firm would have EVER dreamed up the Space Shuttle. NASA over-engineers just about everything. Which means that a lot of stuff never gets tried because the budget is completely busted.

The Center for Disease Control should be privatized and if required, subsidized. Since its ambit is so impossible to challenge — you KNOW it’s loaded with pork. Indeed, Federal medical research spending is pork, upon pork. We’ve sent money back to China so that their whores drink responsibly. ( Idiots! The whore is drinking a soda pop — the jon is drinking the spiked cocktail!)

“The Internet is a large-scale version of the “Committees of Correspondence” that led to the first American Revolution — and with Washington’s failings now so obvious and awful, it may lead to another.”

We need some self regulating systems within our bureaucracy that holds that bureaucracy accountable. A couple of suggestions towards that end:

* An audit of each department of each Federal agency that would analyze whether every request for additional personnel, equipment, etc or that allocated funding spent was actually necessitated by need. Hold the department manager accountable; if it’s found that the department’s spending or request for additional funding was not necessary, terminate the department head at once. Lesser or arguable instances could be handled by a loss of pay, etc or other penalties.

• Allow bureaucrats to be sued for infringement of constitutional rights, particularly infringement of equal protection rights and property rights.

In all countries there exist two classes – the governors and the governed. Over the past 60 years or so, the governors have discovered that they all get along pretty well with most of the other governors. There is brotherhood in governance.

Above most western countries there now presides a Virtual Nation of the elites that is instinctively international and quite aloof from the real nations – those countries of frontiers that have each been long defined from within by time-worn particularity. Thus, the Guardian reading administrator in London has a natural affinity with the public officials of Washington and Paris, and a corresponding contempt for the vulgarians of his own suburb with their “Little Englandism” and cussed antipathy to tax officers.

The Virtual Nation despises the national-ism of the little countries (and even the United States is little under the lofty gaze of the VN), and is yet xenophobic to those who stand beyond the frontier of its own conviction. At all points it seeks to extend its regulation and creed, for it is becoming a colonising power of the mind, and few politicians have the wit or will to resist.

The VN is not a conspiracy, but insofar as its members have a collective consciousness (they choose to self-define as ‘progressive’), they also have an instinct that prompts the breakdown of Exceptionism within each subject country. A culturally unified nation is a threat to the VN, for such nations, when stared into, have – like Nietzsche’s abyss – the unnerving ability to stare back.

The VN is not exclusively made up of public servants – its truest patriots are often media folk – but it is yet driven primarily by the self interest of the bureaucratic mind. After all, if one is (a) paid from public funds, to (b) control, regulate and monitor the lives of fellow citizens, it is natural enough to sing the praises of governance; and equally natural to seek friendship and alliance with similar minded chaps elsewhere who are merely doing their bit to keep the small people under control.

“A State with 30+ million people is itself too large for meaningful self-government.”

No, they just need faster servers. In the time it took me to type that sentence a lot more then 30 million Electronic communications passed around the world.
We ( the Human race) has the technology to provide planet wide democracy. We just don’t have the will.
Besides, if we had a planet wide democracy, either China or India would pretty much run things. I’m not good with that.

PR/13; you’ll find this interesting –the the Washington Rebel piece –the link goes thru Maggie’s because of jappy’s remark in the comments –dovetails a bit with the ideas in that IBD article you linked in #91.

But that is a good way to think of it, no? And I think it may be accurate.

I was saddened to read your earlier comments about quitting or cutting back on commenting here. I always enjoy reading your comments. I haven’t started going around and talking to my neighbors, though, because that is not something I’m good at. I’m not a “people person” and am not very persuasive in conversation. If I started knocking on doors, I’d probably turn off more people than I would convert. We all have different strengths and weaknesses.

As an earlier commenter said, there are many people who read but never comment. So your words here may be having more influence than you realize.

But if you believe that talking to your neighbors is a better use of your time than commenting on Belmont Club, then by all means do so. We all have different roles to play in this effort. I’ll still look forward to your reports here.

Papa Ray: I received your stuff and can read it fine; I have Open Office right along side both Microsoft Office and Corel Office. Have begun implementation, thank you.

Thought experiment for teachers to propose to their classes. Requires that regular quizzes and tests use a standard measure of achievement and that the letter grades be assigned based on those achievements (eg. 60-69=D, 70-79=C, etc).

You get to choose your grading system. You can choose between a capitalist, socialist or mixed system.

In the capitalist system every individual’s grade is added up and averaged for that individual’s final grade.

In the Socialist system everyone’s grade is added up and averaged, and everyone gets the same collective grade.

In the mixed system everyone who gets an above average grade is docked a certain number of points to be assigned to those who scored below average.

What a day of utter folly. Papa Ray, you’ll be pleased to know I spent the whole day talking earnestly to people, and yet you’ll be sadly amused that when I came home my son took one look at me and said, “Dad, why is your shirt on backwards?”

Accordingly, blert’s inspired me to tilt against a favored windmill again, when he says, “The number one source of our bloated ‘do-better’ class is unlimited funding.” Folks, this source is the Federal Reserve. Our crazy, ponzi-like financial situation could not be, but for the Fed. The easy money provided by a central bank is very much like a drug upon our Congress, and now they’re totally gone and pushing it on us. People make the mistake of relating federal finances to their own or their business’s finances. It is nothing of the kind. They do not realize that when the federal government says it’s borrowing money quite often it is not borrowing at all. The Fed is creating money for it. This is a tax upon you right now that is very hard to see but it is substatial. It is not entirely correct to say the bill is being wracked up for our grandkids, and that we a creating a future problem. It is more correct to say that problem is now, and it has ever been. Federal largesse has a current and immediate harmful impact, today, and yesterday, much less tomorrow. blert has also hit upon the financial chaos that brought down the Articles of Confederation, which touches upon the fact that most of the lessons to be learned about the Federal Reserve are actually lessons that we have to re-learn. George Washington knew them well in 1786 when he complained it took a wagon full of dollars to buy a wagon full of goods. He was expressing a common alarm. We’ve been to Weimar before in this country; we were born of such a crisis. The feeling that we’re headed back into such waters, by many on this board, constitues what I hope will prove to be a harbinger to a keener awakening for all of us. We’ve got a large class of people and much stronger institutions addicted to this weal than we did back then. And we have no Washingtons, Jeffersons, or Madisons on hand – proven leader who had a tremendous grasp on the problem. The task is far harder. Fuels Papa Ray’s exhortation to man up.

Oh, one thing underscored by today’s events: the topic of public-private partnerships. They’re being sold as the way for a taxpayer to get a bigger bang for his buck, encorporating the best of both worlds. They’re poison. Any ideas on how to better refute them would be greatly appreciated.

Cowboy @ 99: Accordingly, blert’s inspired me to tilt against a favored windmill again, when he says, “The number one source of our bloated ‘do-better’ class is unlimited funding.” Folks, this source is the Federal Reserve.

Yes, but we got on OK with it pretty much through 2008 … or maybe 2001 … or maybe 1991, those two older dates when Greenspan held interest rates below inflation causing bubbles. Only as of September 2008 or so, when Paulson went to Congress to ask for $770b, and in 2009 when Bernanke and co went nuts printing money at unprecedented speed, did the evil influences that you see, really take form. And really, even now have they taken form? Hard to say.

So, perhaps the Fed as such is not evil – though it ought to be opened up to daylight. Y’know, Federal Reserves don’t kill people, people kill people.

And contrary to what others have said, words and rules do have meaning.

Oh, I never said words and rules didn’t have meaning. They do. They just don’t have any power over con men and criminals. They only have power over decent men, but if we let ourselves be fooled that mere words and rules will keep the likes of Charlie Rangle, Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, et al in line and under control, then we’re damn fools.

The problem is not the rules. Makng the rules more clear, more strict, more complete, won’t solve the problem. Trying to address it that way is the bureaucratic approach, and it only leeds to more corruption, confusion and paralysis, and more power flowing to those willing to flaunt the rules.

Rules are the issue. Men are. The rules we have are fine, but the people we’ve been electing are no damn good. Change the rules and relect the same people and nothing gets better.

Don’t put your faith in words to keep the jackals away. You are responsible for keeping jackals away – the rules are there to help decent people do the job. Find some decent people and the old rules will start working again.

No, Josh. You’re looking at it the wrong way. The Federal Reserve does not hold inflation down, and it never has. It holds inflation up. It maintains what it claims to be a “manageable” level of inflation. Manageable for whom, Josh? You a saver? We used to have such things!

Cowboy, I agree the Fed holds inflation up. I’m not sure what you seem to be reading from my post. Mainstream dogma for years has been the system is most stable with a little inflation. This may or may not be true. I’m just saying that the Fed has not, since WWII through 2008, done wholesale funding of crazed central government projects. The CRA may have been foolish and nasty, but the Fed’s role in it was no more than the role they’d played in any other large monetary projects in the last hundred years or so. Did the Fed play much of a role in the Depression, funding things and causing inflation? Offhand I don’t know, but don’t think so.

Josh, the Federal Reserve has been inextricably linked with federal finance in toto since Woodrow Wilson. It is involved in the wholesale funding of not only the crazed central government programs but rather of all federal government programs. I wonder that you make a distinction without a difference. I do not allege merely that things went horribly awry in 2008 and it was because the Federal Reserve proved to be untrustworthy after all. I allege that the Federal Reserve was untrustworthy in 1913, upon the date of its conception, because the whole paradigm was wrong. In my opinion it does my thesis no harm that since 1913 we’ve had some great times and good years. I’m far more interested in tracing down the fundamental sources of ever-encroaching central power that has incrementaly led us to this point. The Federal Reserve is no small culprit in this, not at all.

Borrowing, borrowing, borrowing, borrowing, borrowing … the federal government has been borrowing its way through my entire life. And yours. Don’t even try to suggest “budget was balanced in 2000″, because that’s only true with a big spoon of sugar and some smoke and mirrors. How is that possible? What enables such an insane debt binge? Why does that defy everything I’ve always been taught by elders, by peers, and by professionals on how to manage affairs?

You could take this to the degree of refusing to enforce any federal law – as an exclusive Fed prerogative. Make sure people have health insurance? Sorry, that’s a federal matter. Traffic controls and protection for visiting Fed Grandees? Sorry, not a state matter. Assist the BATFE or FBI? Sorry, not permitted to a state agency.
How far can our imagination take this tactic?

We’ve been living in a fool’s paradise – my whole life, which corresponds pretty much with the outsourcing of jobs, from steel and autos in the 1960s, to IT and semiconductors today. The complete hollowing out of America.

Monetary policy and mechanics are secondary to that.

In particular, we’ve been living only via bubbles and debt since 1991. My ultra-liberal friend was always ranting about that, some semi-obscure ecnomists he was reading, and it’s a point on which we found agreement. Except that he was sure that somehow this was a Republican plot and I just sneered at him for saying so.

If your point is that an elite will steal billions if you let them, for public policy or not, well yeah. Trillions. Or, take the service charge for moving the trillions around, one can live well on that and be somewhere else when it all hits the fan.

Josh and Cowboy: When it comes to central banking, I am downright Jacksonian
in my basic outlook.

Yet, there is the age-old question of who or what shall be the Bank of Issue.
If government is going to be involved or excercise any kind of control, then I for one do not know how to improve on the basics of the Federal Reserve system.

I remember when the Fed created new money and then let the member banks try to loan it. That was inflation. Under the Volker-Greenspan era, the system changed. The
borrowers themselves created new money by taking out loans. Since people won’t take out loans unless the goods are there, we proceeded to dis-inflate and enjoy price stability (except for real estate!) for quite some time.

However, by not paying savers an adequate rate of interest, borrowers interest rates went abnormally low and total private debt loads became more than could be handled.

The result of that is deflation with attitude. And short of flooding the country with M1 (coins and currency) there is nothing the Fed or anybody else can do about it. If the government doesn’t spend and the Fed doesn’t “print money”, M3 et al will continue to shrink and deflation will continue. If the government spends and the Fed “prints money” the total debt burden will increase, more loans will go bad
and the fires of deflation will roar ever higher.

Deflation will cease when debt service (and retirement) declines to not more
that 25% to 35% of shrunken, non-borrowed, income. We have a ways to go.

As Eggplant noted, Bernanke needs to get the stick out of his lap, get the nose down,
and at least be able to walk away from the landing.

My suggestion would be to require member banks to pay at least 5-6% on liquid accounts and 8% plus on timed deposits. This will jack borrowers rates way up there
and new lending will continue its anaemic pace at higher cost. Also require that
non-secured debt (plastic) include at least two points to principal in their minimum payments. Higher margin requirements for bonds, including government bonds, will
slow the rate at which Treasury can place bonds. This will force government’s hand
and result in more prudence on their part.

All of which will get our deflation into high gear and will get total debt liquidated
tout suite.

A simple question: If 50% of each State’s money comes from the Federal Government, then how likely is it that any State will defy the Feds on anything financial?

I like the notion that, given the recent stay on the AZ law, the signal is that each State should say it is no longer their responsibility to enforce any Federal law. States should be able to argue that they should only enforce State laws now. But then the Feds will say that unless the States do what they tell them, the money will stop.

Perhaps some States can play chicken with the Feds on that and hold out long enough for the Feds to blink, but most can’t. And you can count on the Supremes to side with the Feds.

On the other hand, as some have suggested in this thread, at least this will clarify how void the 10th Amendment is.

Your missives are inspirational. When I first encountered Codevilla’s essay on the American Ruling Class I printed twenty copies. I then organized a BBQ for a group of friends, we meet regularly for other reasons but I got them together for the express purpose of discussing the essay.

Some are hard-right like myself, others are center-right and center-left, one is even a Marxist. We had a very thought provoking series of discussions throughout the afternoon and well into the evening. I did this with you in mind, I wanted to get a group of active people talking about the issue of whether or not we can make the Denizens of the Beltway aware of us commoners out here in Flyover country.

By the end of the evening three groups had been formed; one to target specific candidates with money, another is currently organizing friends and family to go door to door to raise awareness and a third is currently engaging in a “opinion bomb” effort loading up the local papers and media outlets with phone calls and letters to make the Old School media aware that there are other voices. Even the Marxist agreed that DC is out of touch and self-serving, he won’t agree with me about what needs to be done beyond a thorough bench-clearing but he is willing to lend a hand clearing the bench so I have made him welcome.

Note these groups formed of their own accord, it was not the objective of the BBQ to start this sort of thing, it just occurred to people that there was a crying need for action and they jumped in. We will be looking into organizing an effort for the elections to ensure that everyong has a chance to get to the polls and to be sure there is no shenanigans going once they get there. A small effort to be sure but I have asked each person that attended to undertake a similar effort, so far nine have agreed.

Now all I need to do is run to the print shop and get 180 copies of the essay printed.

Clinton NEVER ran a surplus! That BS is trotted out constantly by the Left.

If you look at the Federal debt outstanding at years end it went constantly UP throughout the Clinton years.

The ‘surplus’ is a joke caused by stuffing Social Security receipts into tax collections for the general fund. You can bet your last dollar when SS starts cashing in its T’Notes that the regime is NOT going to consider that additional deficit spending.

The rule is: when the SS takes in more than it pays then the deficit is jiggered down.

When the SS needs to draw down its account and reverse the flow then the deficit is NOT to be described as going up to cover it.

Ron Paul was just now on a phone interview with Foxbiznews, Fox had asked about the SEC’s newly-lawful Freedom of Information Act exemption. Paul, sounding as usual stunned but not surprised, said something like, “you know, I’m ON these committees, and i heard nothing about this exemption until i saw the report of it on Fox News. This is why, on any long bill, it’s better to just vote ‘no’. The reason the bills are so long is so that anybody can throw these things in at the last minute and before you know it the whole landscape has changed. On this thing, I’ve put my staff to work, I want to know who put it in the bill, why, and how.”

(Alice-in-Wonderland, you have messages)

Somehow, listening to Paul, my memory harked back to this old article –the author is trying to describe something we keep seeing over and over but cannot quite find the words to describe (which is of course no doubt why we keep seeing it over and over again).

They allowed deflation at the start of the depression by not printing enough money when the banks collapsed. Roosevelt kept the depression going by creating uncertainty. Thereafter, the Fed aimed for moderate inflation. In the 60s their charter was changed to include a duty to provide full employment as well as their historical duty to maintain a stable currency. They obliged with the inflation of the 70s. Subsequently, they’ve acted as Josh outlined.

Currently, the Fed is printing a lot of money but it’s not causing inflation (i.e., the CPI has not increased much) because of low velocity. Historically, velocity increases when the economy improves. At that point, the Fed must reduce the rate of monetary growth (“take away the punch bowl”). This has been a weakness, and requires the Fed to resist political pressure. Bernanke has at least said all this, so might actually do it if required. The gold market does not believe so, apparently.

So the Fed failed badly in the 30s, and may be now. They had lesser failures in the 70s and possibly 90s. Overall, we’ve had a better economy than the rest of the world in the last century. Granted, some economies starting from a lower base did better over shorter periods.

Alternate systems include the gold standard, private banks printing money, independent currency board (not sure how this differs from the Fed system), and Friedmann’s 3% rule. All but the last have been tried.

Anton/118; good show! Fred Thompson has a new TV spot, speaking for the League of American Voters (no, dunno much about them yet), directing interest to the end-of-year tax increase that will probably determine the health (‘sink or swim’) of the US economy, at http://www.renewthetaxcuts.com –

The nature of financial markets is positive feed-back loops based upon rear-view linear-projection ‘driving’ of decisions.

Canada is at the top of a staggering housing bubble — but until the egg breaks it is not acknowledged. Indeed, Canada is being exampled as the right way to handle the real estate market!

In the Euro zone all kinds of dis-information is spread by officialdom. Starting with the notion that the ECB has replaced all of the participating central banks of Europe. That is a total lie. When our Fed swapped $500,000,000,000 in a thirty day period it was with 15 different central banks. (Bernanke testimony on the Hill) No way did he restrict himself to the ECB and Japan. His paperwork is ONLY set-up to deal with sovereign central banks — because of our laws.

The Euro is set up to be a one to one parity union. This synthetic gold standard (could be synthetic silver standard) must breakdown in a mess after enough economic-techtonic stress causes the economic plates to collide. Things like finding out that Greece was lying — always — about her sovereign books. The consequence of the fraud was to permit Athens to hand out even more largesse in extremely uneconomic subsidies (Greek National Railways) and get into an impossible hole. [Think of yourself getting a staggering pile of 'house credit' chips and completely blowing the wad. Only then you find out that the world casino insists that you pay off your markers. That you are a compulsive politician -- and have been spending and lying all of your life gets no traction with collection management. Again and again you plead -- for a fifth. Finally in a fit of rage you confront your co-dependent: "You KNEW I was a compulsive politician and degenerate lier when you gave me credit. It's NOT MY FAULT! "]

——

Although a return to a gold standard has been mooted, the Constitution, in black letter law, placed the Federal Government on a SILVER STANDARD. The coin of commerce back then was a Thaler.

Obviously, at day zero NO US Dollars existed. Our commerce was dominated by Spanish silver, typically a ‘Piece of Eight.’ As it was minted these coins had marks for cutting in half, then half again and ten one last bisection. Thus, eight pieces from one Piece of Eight. Should you look, cut up silver can still be found in numismatic coin dealer’s inventories.

(The reeded edges were used for the sectioning. This stopped someone from claiming he can’t pay off even because he doesn’t have ‘change.’ This type of transaction was most typical with pirates splitting the ‘take’ where tomorrow may never come and credit did not exist. Normally, in regular trade change was ready to hand and the vast bulk of Pieces of Eight were never molested.)

Eights of a dollar, of course, became the tick minimum on Wall Street. Trading in eights only stopped with total electronic trading. The brokers fought against decimalization all these years.

It took the California gold strike to enable Congress to outlaw commercial transactions in all foreign specie. (Which explains the low, low mintages prior to that time. America was still using Spanish, Austrian and British specie for the vast bulk of her internal trade. What wasn’t specie was local bank notes that did not travel far.)

( The Maverick TV series wherein the boys are going all over the frontier betting and cashing massive bank notes is a riot. ANY banknote from out of town would have to clear just like it was a cashier’s check. That’s where the original wire frauds began. Players would coerce the telegrapher to confirm falsely on such notes and generally corrupt the trade. Code books came into wide use so that even the telegrapher didn’t quite know what he was transmitting. Of course, the banks were sending specie and notes back and froth by strong box — Wells Fargo, anyone?)

——-

In the real world Credit is created by commercial banks when they make loans, period. This credit functions altogether as money in our Credit-Money System. AFTER the bank creates the credit it runs around and hunts down enough deposits/liquidity to meet the Federal Reserves standards. If there is not enough money/liquidity in the system as a whole a frantic panic occurs immediately prior to a reporting period. ( There are four per year — take a guess!) If the Fed sees this coming on it ‘prints’ ‘high-powered-money’ and reliquefies the over-night repo market. This stops the market from having a liquidity seizure and snap bankruptcies.

Back in the 19th Century, liquidity crunches happened with cyclical regularity. Most notable were the railroad implosions when their construction budges were being funded by short term ( and cheap ) credit. IIRC the Northern Pacific went under THREE times! (Today part of Burlington Northern) This occurred under the ‘gold standard’ which was really a bi-metallic specie standard.

The final emotional crunch of the era was the panic of 1906. J.P.Morgan, the banker who bailed out President Cleveland, now had to bail out/reliquefy his ‘crew.’ He packed them in a conference room and spread the pain. Some bankers were wiped out: just too gutsy with their capital to take the hits. Afterwards, Morgan pronounced the survivors solid as gold — and he’d make sure, personally, that they had the silver and gold to meet redemptions. The Panic was lifted.

It then occurred to one and all that even J.P. can’t live forever. Say, let’s morph his judgement and credibility into an august institution. Morgan already ran the banker’s bank — so let’s fold it into the new entity. We’ll call it the Federal Reserve Bank. All of the key players will stump up the founding capital. It’s role is to provide liquidity during panics. It must then only invest in Gold, Silver, and US Government Debt that has a ‘full faith and credit’ stipulation. With such a base, credibility is absolute — as long as the Government stands. It will fund itself out of government paid interest upon its debt held by the bank.

And here is where it gets interesting:

Us bankers are going to get Congress to give us this role exclusively and to accept our bearer notes ( Federal Reserve Notes — the stuff in your wallet) as legal tender right along side gold and silver specie. The flip side is that our bank will always make sure that the US Treasury has successful auctions. If necessary, this private bank will step in. (Why ever not — the Fed can print greenbacks just like Lincoln did.)

That the Federal Reserve Act was passed in the shadow of WWI is no coincidence. The Act provided a nice mechanism for re-Greenbacking the currency – no?)

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The key to remember is that once the Fed, or the banks ramp up credit stall conditions will kick in. Credit stall= asset deflation. The more intrinsically the credit market is linked to the pricing of an asset the more severe the updraft and subsequent collapse.

Super-leveraged real estate is the ultimate expression of that phenomenon. Not even the national government can stop real estate from being re-priced back to normal. The correct emphasis should be to let the credit bubble pop and let the biggest speculators take the beat-down. While that unfolds, the government should provide a humanitarian floor under society so that mega-breadlines don’t form. Such maintenance is NOT a budget killer.

What the government should not do is shove speculative failures onto its books. Any step down that road socializes the risk and hands over the candy to the irrational few. Naturally, this is exactly where the vast, vast bulk of ‘anti-depression’ medicine has gone.

That the brainiacs, mostly from the East Coast, are still stuck on stupid is hard-wired into our vanity-feedback loop.

Well, heck I had to take off early today because my oldest had a dental appointment and I come in and try to catch up and see all this. Makes an old man feel a lot better – I will tell you for sure – But I’m thinking I don’t deserve it, but I damn sure will take it anyway.

Salt Lick, Thanks. Yes “something” has indeed got out of the bottle and we must see that it is passed around and drank deeply by as many as we can convince to partake. Keep passing it around and – Thank you.

Moniker, Well thank you too. Your the third person in this world that has used that word in association with me. Does it still count if the other two are my oldest grandsons?
My heart felt thanks for your efforts and I must say encouraging results. Yes, this is exactly what is needed and what must be done by as many individual Americans as possible. BBQs and other social events are a good place to start but it must not end there. The general public, especially our younger people are the ones that must be targeted as well. Ideas and suggestions as how to engage them must be thought over, tried, modified and tried again. They are our future, no matter how badly they have been brainwashed, neglected or put aside as worthless. They are not worthless but just like any child or young adult [I call anyone under 40 a young adult] a reflection of their upbringing and education. We have to re-educate them in the history, importance and intent of our Founders and foster pride for our Republic within each of them.

That is what foot soldiers do. Go door to door, looking for those that maybe never have voted, who don’t know what is going on, never cared. Those are the ones we need to also be talking to.

We need to bust their bubble.

LLIII, Yes it will take a massive amount of work by as many as we can get to man the line. I’m sure that you would agree that our enemies have gathered and are gathering even more of their forces to destroy us in every way that they can. Thank you for all your efforts.

Cowboy, Yes I know your trying and I hope that disappointment will not do anything but make you try harder. Yes States can and should fight back and starting at the local level is one way to force states that are not willing or ready to fight our enemies. That is why everyone should make a point of attending every local meeting that they can and make their voices heard and at voting time, their votes felt. Thank you and our Republic thanks you too.

RagnarD, Yes, the majority of the “silent majority” have been sheep for the last half century. Just working, living, loving and sometimes fighting and dying in our wars. But many, many are awake and are waking up now and don’t like waking up in the middle of a nightmare. It is up to the sheepdogs to show them how to fight back, to protect themselves and their young. You are one of the sheepdogs and we are depending on you.

mac, all I can tell you is to send emails to your representatives including local and state until they know you by your first name as mine do and tell all your like minded friends to do the same. Your help however you can manage is desperately needed.

oMan, Dang, Thanks much, but I’m sure net wide I have many more distractors and critics than most anything else. But what I want is to make “my story” – which is doing all I can to protect and preserve my Republic for my kids and grand kids – to become every American’s story. Yea I know, and Thank you for your efforts.

rickl, I said the same thing…”I’m just not a people person” but then I said I have to do something. I started out small without much direction and no support, didn’t even have any handouts or such. But as I did what I though I couldn’t do, I found out a way for me to do it “without turning off more people than I would convert”. But it is also more than that. You could find people that are already converted but just don’t have the way or that last push to actually go and vote. YOU can fire them up, where they will vote.

YOU can do it, you can get on the line.

I have a handout with all the objections or reasons people don’t vote that counters with reasons they should and must [off the web].
You can drive right? Offer rides to those that can’t. Or if you don’t drive, arrange taxis or a friend to help you. Locate and talk to your local GOP, ask if they have something you can do. Allocate an hour or so every day to send emails to all of your reps, from local to federal. You can find someway to help We need your help, Please. The democrats will have everybody out to make sure every tom, jose, dick, harry, mickey mouse and tunnel rat votes. Even the dead.

Tamquam, OUTSTANDING, I hope you weren’t too disappointed in my meager efforts. Someone with more computer and writing skills could do a much better job I’m positive. I found a great resource last night:“American Daughter” with lots of great links to other great resources. I’m going to try and compile some of the writings, quotes and such as well as direct people to her website in a handout.

Remember don’t let disappointment get you down. Just try harder and smarter and enlist help. Thank you for stepping up to the line. We need every person we can get.

A little story – Today I picked up the girls and was headed to the dentist’s office and got a call from one of the guys that I had talked to yesterday. He wanted to know if I had any handouts I could give him to give to his friends. I said sure I did and that we would be by later after the dentist appointment. So we went by and he was there with a couple of guys and two girls. All these kids were under thirty and they just went crazy over my two little girls [grand daughters to those who don't know but I feel like they are my daughters sometimes] Anyway, we all talked awhile and I gave them the handouts and told them that Kinko’s made copies cheap and fast if they ran out. Seems like these young folk are used to getting everything free or given to them.

anton, YOU are inspirational. It sounds like you are making a great effort. Keep everyone involved, ask for ideas, projects, widen the circle, get them to get their friends involved. Remind them all, every time you can that this fight is not just for us but for our families and our descendants. This is the fight for the survival of our liberties and our wonderful Republic which now is in terrible danger. Read them this:

Thank you so much for your outstanding efforts. Keep it up never give up. We have a long way to go.

Time is growing short, they are flanking us and getting ready for a full frontal assault. Gather your warriors, arm them well and tell them that if they want life and liberty not only for themselves but for all those that come after – To Fight with every resource and ability that they have or can come up with.

Tell them that this is just the first battle in this war for our Republic,but that we must not, can not lose this one, and they must fight with all the strength of their forefathers and to give no quarter.

oldjs #123: When people cannot pay their debts the money supply decreases. When people are unemployed income decreases thereby decreasing the money supply. This is what is happening now. It is called deflation.

If the government adds to the total debt burden the government prolongs the deflation. If government spending helps to liquidate debt the government will
help get deflation over and done with. BUT: the government is but a minor determinant in whether or not deflation exists. In fact, it is close to being irrelevant.